Richard James Rivet was born in Aklavik, Northwest Territories in 1949. In addition to receiving a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the University of Saskatchewan, he has been the recipient of over twenty awards, scholarships and bursaries. Since 1979, he has taken part in over forty prestigious exhibitions throughout Canada and abroad. His paintings have been collected privately, as well as by the Museum of Civilization, the Government of British Columbia, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Royal Bank of Canada and the Alberta Energy Company, among others. More recently in 2002, he was part of the 8th Native American Fine Art Invitational, a juried exhibition held by the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona where he received an Andy Warhol Foundation Fellowship from the same institution.

"My work explores a Metis-Canadian sensibility with modernist concerns. I have an expressionist-primitivist approach to painting with subject matter related to two aspects of my Native-Canadian reality and viewpoint. These concerns are the shamanic/spiritual tradition of native peoples and the problem of resolving this tradition with contemporary artwork. My work involves combining and reinterpreting the iconography of ancient peoples in a contemporary perspective, using abstract poetic symbolism. Intuition, sensuality, emotive content and creative thought are all combined in an individualistic consideration of means and method.

The ancient tradition of Shamanic-based art offers huge potential in the development of new "Canadian" art. My work aspires to the spiritual, to the recovery of the main tradition of creativity. My role as an artist is not to represent 'Indigenous,' 'Native' or 'First Nations' art. My art represents aspects of my own culture and personal history, and in the wider archetypal sense includes all common human experience."- Rick Rivet


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