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Omar Vera was born in Sacramento, CA, in 1977, the child of Pakistani immigrant parents. During his career, he has lived and worked in Seattle, WA, Chicago, IL, Houston, TX, Richmond, VA, and currently resides in Olympia, WA. His formal training is in the field of ceramics, which he has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hyde Park Art Center. He has exhibited his work in Seattle, Chicago, New York, Houston, and Vancouver, B.C.
Vera’s artwork employs traditional sculptural media and new media such as video, kinetics and computer generated forms as a means of questioning the convergences and contractions that shape American culture. Themes of race and origin often figure prominently in his work as he explores the legacies and iconographies that inform both his personal identity, and a larger cultural identity. Particularly of interest in his work are moments of conflict, often quiet, but always illustrative of the tension between the powerful and the powerless, and between the past and the present.