Victoria Rundberg-Rivera, MD

Ancestral Threads is my offering to the parts of me that were separated, renamed, and, at times, silenced. As an adoptee with Indigenous heritage and Afro‐Mestiza diaspora roots, I grew up with a lineage I could feel but not fully trace. These paintings begin where records and explanations end: in the body’s memory, in intuition, in the quiet insistence that I belong to something older and wider than any single story I was given. My early life was shaped by the harm of no protection under  the guise of love. But this work is not a document of damage, it is an act of return. I paint to reclaim what was interrupted: tenderness, voice, and the right to define myself. The“threads” in this exhibit are literal and symbolic...braids of intertwining color, fractured patterns, repeated marks, and layered surfaces that echo the ways identity is pieced together when inheritance arrives through fragments. I let the canvas hold contradiction: grief beside radiance, rupture beside resilience, longing beside joy. For years, I lived in the language of medicine... precision, diagnosis, and proof. Becoming a physician taught me to stay present with suffering, to read what isn’t said, and to honor the complexity inside a single human life. Visual art became the place where I could step beyond what is measurable. My expressionist approach (urgent gesture, saturated color, and unapologetic distortion) mirrors the emotional truth of lived experience: how the past can surge forward, how the nervous system remembers, how the spirit insists on both movement and stillness. Ultimately, Ancestral Threads is about freedom. Each painting is a small liberation: from secrecy, from imposed narratives, from inherited shame. I am not searching for a perfect origin story...I am weaving a living one. These works are prayers for reconnection, and declarations of self-possession: that survival can become language, and that art can turn loss into lineage.