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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 soil, coffee plants, tools, harvests, and landscapes of his childhood are inseparable from the stories, relationships, and sensations that have shaped his artistic practice.
Rather than presenting the coffee farm as a nostalgic image of rural life, the exhibition considers it as a living archive. The works revisit the farm through memory—sometimes recognizable, sometimes fragmented or abstracted. Familiar elements are transformed, allowing personal recollection to become a broader meditation on ancestry, labor, belonging, and the passage of time.
Throughout Grounds of Memory, the artist moves between the tangible and the remembered. Coffee becomes more than a crop: it becomes a visual and emotional language. The recurring presence of coffee and the landscape points to the ways ordinary materials and places can carry extraordinary personal histories.
The exhibition invites viewers to consider their own relationships to place and memory. In the artist’s hands, the coffee farm becomes both a specific landscape and a metaphor for memory itself—something cultivated over time, rooted deeply, and continually transformed by experience.
Grounds of Memory will be on view at Gallery 40 from October 17, 2016 through November 29. An opening reception will be held on Saturday October 17, 5-7pm.
Exhibition Details
Grounds of Memory
Artist: Alcides Rivas
Venue: Gallery 40
Location: 40 Cannon Street, Poughkeepsie, NY
October 17, November 29, 2026
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40 Cannon Street, Poughkeepsie, NY, United States, New York 12601
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