Lance Rivers

Lance Rivers’ art practice emphasizes the idea, above all others, of the local as monumental. No aspect of the processes that make a city function has escaped him, and the attention he has given to the beauty of simple, industrial compositions shows an authentic love for his hometown, San Francisco, where he was born in 1967.

Rivers is wholly absorbed with architectural representation. "I started to notice bridges, tunnels and transportation when I was a teenager. I started to make sketches of what I saw." He ranges widely over this chosen terrain: commercial and residential buildings, Sutro and Coit Towers, all of the Bay Area bridges and train lines, the escalators and station interiors of MUNI and BART, and large-scale construction machinery. Rivers states: "My work is about landscape, architecture, bridges, tunnels and transportation. I am inspired by BART, MUNI buses, streetcars and trains. I like nature too. These things are interesting to me." He has, on occasion, ventured further afield and made studies of the great buildings and bridges of the world.

Rivers' work was featured in Create, a traveling exhibition that first opened at University Of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2011.