Armando Olivera

Biography

Armando Olivera is a visual artist who works out of the Pacific Northwest.

He works abstractly with an assortment of media that focuses on grappling with questions pertinent to states of being and his associations that deal with interrogating his identity in establishing a place of belonging. His practice grows through collaboration with materials and their allocation within space and time to reconcile the pertinence that expands the path to continuous growth through the work.

He incorporates ideas from the historical record that are dispersed through the functions of memory and personal experiences that illustrate the connection between identity and patterns of behavior. 

He obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in Art (Drawing and Painting) with a minor in Art History and is committed to growing his practice in an Academic setting. 

He has recently accepted the invitation to become the visiting artist for studioELL for 2026

Artist Statement

Armando Olivera is an artist whose work grows out of lifelong migrations across countries, cultures, and states of being. Through abstraction, he explores what it means to belong and how memory, movement, and the process of adaptation shapes who we are.

His work composes and reconstitutes fragments of remembrance, sensation, and transformative outcomes to make sense of the spaces traveled through. The process itself echoes the journey of locating home: tentative, layered, and continuously in flux.

Working with the materials is an ongoing conversation. Each mark, texture, and surface becomes a trace of that investigation — a way of grounding the self and inviting others to see something of their own reflection. His optimism rests in the work to create a shared space beyond borders or definitions where belonging is fluid, open, and possible for all.