It All Circles Back to the Basics of Drawing: The Art of Sandra Vivas

Sandra Vivas, Apariencia Desnuda de “Paisaje Invisible”, collage and drawing on acid free paper, 2018. Courtesy of Abra gallery.

Recognized as one of the pioneers of performance art and of feminism as a subject matter in Venezuela, contemporary artist and filmmaker Sandra Vivas (Caracas, 1969), began drawing in early childhood. Later she experimented with dance, performance, video art, and other media, never abandoning her passion for drawing which has recently led her to a promising new career path as a creator and director of animated films.

Daughter of renowned Venezuelan architect Fruto Vivas, her childhood was spent drawing and experimenting with colors and materials. Vivas remembers her parents' influence on her artistic choices and experimentations as a very loving and positive one that led her to have a natural inclination towards the arts. As a child she began publishing her drawings in various national children’s newspapers like Perro Nevado (a periodic publication from Mérida, Venezuela) and El Carabobeño, from Valencia, Venezuela.

While doing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, she also studied drawing and painting at the Instituto Federico Brandt. She then went to the U.S., where she earned her Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in California.

Sandra Vivas’ profile published in Revista Cultural Estilo, Nº 30, 1997

Over the years, Vivas has shown her work extensively in multiple solo and collective exhibitions in Venezuela, Colombia, Panamá, Costa Rica, Peru, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Barbados, Dominica, Trinidad & Tobago, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, U.S., Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Latvia, Australia, Kenya and Japan, while also conducting workshops on mixed media arts and film making in several countries.

Currently based in Trafalgar, on the Caribbean island of Dominica since 2009, Vivas has had to reinvent herself several times, at times feeling ostracized from her native country and its institutions after years of being far away. Límites/Boundaries, her most recent solo show, was held in the gallery Abra, at the Centro Cultural Los Galpones, in Caracas, Venezuela, back in 2022. A distance of twelve years separates this show from her previous exhibition in Venezuela, the solo show titled ¿Qué?, held in 2010 in the now disappeared gallery Oficina #1, also at the Centro Cultural Los Galpones.

Views of Sandra Vivas’ solo show Límites/Boundaries (2022), held at Abra gallery in Caracas. Courtesy of Abra gallery.

A video and performance artist with strong conceptual influences, in Límites/Boundaries Vivas questioned clichés about identity, the structures of power, and even migration, which has become a sensitive and often-debated topic in Venezuelan art in recent years. In the exhibition, Vivas displayed five different video performances alongside a selection of her works on paper from 2012 up to 2020 in which photographic images, stills from some of the videos, and even clippings from books are intervened with drawings and paintings.

Some of these works, like Apariencia Desnuda de “No, No, No”, 2018, place the viewer right in front of Vivas’ process, giving them a direct view of her creative work; the piece is a diptych with stills from Bruce Nauman’s video-peformance Clown Torture, 1987, clipped and pasted onto acid-free paper, alongside clipped stills from Vivas’ video-performance No, No, No, 2012, inspired by Nauman’s previous work. Vivas’ video is exhibited on the opposite wall.

Both the images taken from Nauman’s work and those from Vivas’ video are dissected and described in the artist’s handwriting. In these notes, viewers get to see some disparities between how men and women are treated by society, even when their actions and situations are almost identical: next to Nauman’s image we read “A man screams “No” = Torture”, but next to Vivas’ picture, even when both their posture is the same we read: “A women screams “No” = Sexy? Inviting? Disturbing? Funny?”.

Sandra Vivas, Apariencia Desnuda de “No, No, No”, collage and drawing on acid free paper, 2018. Courtesy of Abra gallery.

These messages, written on the borders of the clippings of both video-performances, are political comments on gender disparity, especially in countries like Venezuela, where only in the first semester of 2025 more than 68.000 men have been charged with gender-based violence, including sex crimes. But it is also a step back from the final result of the video-performance: Vivas’ shows not only projections of her videos, but also her sketches as finished artworks; the same happens with two other pieces in this particular solo show.

Her trip to Venezuela in 2022 for the show Límites/Boundaries, held even more importance to Vivas and her work. In September of 2017, Hurricane Maria, the deadliest tropical cyclone to strike Dominica to date, left Vivas and her family in a more than precarious situation, barely keeping their lives. In the process, Vivas’ archives, her sketches, previous works, publications and notes were completely wiped out by the disaster… She almost lost everything.

In her trip to Venezuela, Vivas connected with friends from the local art scene, artists, curators, researchers, and gallery owners with whom she had worked in the past; some of them had recordings of her works, copies of some of her pieces, press clippings, catalogues, books and publications of her work, that they gave to her. She began to recreate her own archive, while, in the process, taking the time to rediscover it, to take inspiration from her findings and realize that she has always been drawing. Vivas started working on her newly recreated archive from a creative and experimental point of view, working with her memory not as a sacred thing to be left untouched and preserved, but more as raw material to create new art from. She created new sketches and drawings for some older works, she scanned photos, old drawings and paintings, and then she created a new archive of drawings.

This going back to the basics has led Vivas to new paths in her artistic practice, beginning a promising career as an independent director of animated films made with traditional techniques: stop-motion using drawings and writings, collages and paper cut animations.

One her animated works can be watched on her YouTube channel and it is a tribute to her late father, the Venezuelan architect Fruto Vivas, that depicts his life from birth in the Andes region of the country, to his studies in Caracas, through his career as one of Venezuela’s most recognized architects, until his death in 2022, just a few months prior to the opening of Sandra Vivas’ Límites/Boundaries.

In 2015 she participated in a screenwriting course by Academy Award-nominated writer and expert in dynamic story design, Christina Lazaridi as a part of the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival. Since then, she has presented her films at the 2015, 2016 and 2017 editions of the same festival, making her debut as a curator in 2016 showcasing experimental films made by Venezuelan creators in the New Media event of the same festival. In 2023, she won a Women in Animation mentorship with director and animator Mark Osborne (Kung Fu Panda).

Currently, Vivas has found a way to both keep drawing and pursue her new passion for filmmaking through the art of traditional animation. This does not mean that her years as a mixed media and performance artist are gone, just that, while working on her art and going back to basics, she has found new ways to keep creating and investigating and working on her interests: memory, the body, womanhood, nature and power relations.

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