Grounds of Memory

​Grounds of Memory, a new exhibition by Alcides Rivas, explores the intimate relationship between memory, place, and identity through the artist’s enduring connection to the coffee farm where he grew up.

Raised among coffee trees, seasonal harvests, and the rhythms of agricultural life, Alcides draws on the landscape of his childhood as both subject and material. Across the exhibition, coffee and the farm appear in direct and indirect forms—through organic textures, earthy colors, recurring forms, fragments of botanical imagery, and materials that evoke the sensory experience of the land. What emerges is not simply a portrait of a particular place, but an exploration of how a place becomes embedded in memory and continues to shape us long after we have left it.

The title Grounds of Memory carries a double meaning: the physical ground of the coffee farm and the emotional grounds upon which memory is formed. For the artist, the…