LaRissa Rogers (b. 1996) is a Black and Korean visual artist raised in Ruckersville, VA. She is currently based between Virginia and Los Angeles. She holds a BFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and a MFA in New Genres from UCLA. Rogers has exhibited and performed in institutions such as Frieze Seoul (Korea), Documenta 15 (Germany), Fields Projects (NY), M+B Gallery (CA), 1708 Gallery (VA), Second Street Gallery (VA), Black Ground (Colombia), W Doha (Qatar), The Fronte Arte Cultura (CA), LACE (CA), Grand Central Art Center (CA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (VA) among others. She received the Visual Arts fellowship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2022) and the Black Artists and Designers Guild Creative Futures Grant (2022). Rogers attended the BEMIS Center of Contemporary Art Residency (2022), Black Spatial Relics Residency (2022), and SOMA (2019), among others. She is the co-founder of the alternative monument and community gathering space "Operations of Care" located in Charlottesville, VA and will be installing a public sculpture with the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston, 2024.
Artist Statement
Rogers’ work looks at the intersections of culture, identity, and embedded forms of colonization expressed through perception and psyche. Combining aspects of memory, history, and personal experience, she expands and complicates the capaciousness of blackness by challenging the politics of hybridity, authenticity, and visibility as an Afro-Asian woman. Often asking the question, who and what survives? She simultaneously engages violence and care as co-constructive forces that structure Black life. By using materials that reference colonial histories Rogers re-contextualizes them to grapple with the entanglements of belonging and fugitivity, beauty and horror, life and death, opacity and transparency, care and resistance.
Often using performance, sculpture, video, installation as methods of address, Rogers contends with the systems of commodification, representation, and female-identified subjectivity as shaped by the experience of diaspora. The body becomes an archive and vessel for collective memory and reimagining, while temporality provides pathways for de-colonial futures and alternative possibilities for Black and Asian people to exist.
rogerslarissam@gmail.com
@larissa_rogers