Costa Rica Public Art Installation
Pieles | Ulises Rivera and Francisco Vásquez May | MADC, San José
On the forecourt of the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (MADC) in San José, a temporary pavilion stands on bamboo legs. Titled Pieles, the structure was conceived by muralist Ulises Rivera in collaboration with architect Francisco Vásquez May — a Costa Rica public art installation developed as part of MADC's 2025 open-call programme for façade and explanada interventions as part of MADC's 2025 open-call programme for façade and explanada interventions.
Pieles occupies the museum's explanada with scale and presence — large enough to enter, pass beneath and circle around, drawing visitors into physical engagement with its surfaces and structure.
The site of the museum carries its own history. MADC is housed in the former National Liquor Factory, a 19th-century industrial complex whose thick masonry walls, exposed tanks and successive reinforced additions record cycles of production and transformation. Rivera and Vásquez May responded with a freestanding canopy whose stratified surfaces echo those accumulated architectural skins — a resonance encoded in the work's title, pieles being the Spanish for skins or hides.
The pavilion is built from clay soils, bamboo, stone and plant fibres using bahareque, a vernacular construction technique widespread across Central America in which earth mixtures are layered over frameworks of bamboo and wood to form walls that breathe and age visibly. The technique is older than the colonial period, refined across seismic landscapes where flexibility and mass matter, and is increasingly being reconsidered by architects working in earthquake-prone regions as an alternative to concrete and steel.
The soils were gathered from different regions of Costa Rica, their natural tones — terracotta, muted green, sand, pale lime — mapping the country's geography across the structure's surface. Rivera, whose practice is inspired by public muralism, integrates colour directly into these earthen layers. The result is a painted ceiling that is also structural: painting becomes load-bearing; architecture becomes image.That inversion carries conceptual weight. In the Western tradition, painting is applied to structure — decorative, dependent, secondary. Here the logic is reversed: the pigment is the wall, the image holds the roof. It is a dismantling of a hierarchy so ingrained it usually goes unexamined.
Viewed from a distance, Pieles looks like an angled roof plane, faceted and sheltering. Up close, the surface presents the marks of those who made the structure — finger impressions, tool traces, irregular edges — evidence of the three-month collaborative build that drew in museum staff, architecture students, faculty and volunteers alongside the two artists. That communal dimension is part of the work's meaning. The model of construction implies a shared, embodied knowledge.
This Costa Rica public art installation opens along an east–west axis toward the elevated tanks of the former factory, establishing a sightline between past industrial labour and present material experimentation. Beneath it, the changing light affects how its experienced: bamboo slats cast narrow bands of sun across the clay; the earthen surface absorbs heat differently across its tonal range.
As sustainability discourse gravitates toward technological solutions, Pieles looks to soil, fibre and the country's historical craft. Bahareque construction encodes generations of understanding: how materials source locally, how they age, how they respond to climate and use. This is a refined body of knowledge, one that Rivera and Vásquez May bring into conversation with contemporary art practice and the institutional space of the museum.
Pieles is on view at MADC, San José. MÍRAME Fine Art represents Ulises Rivera and has supported the placement of his mural work across private spaces in Costa Rica. As a Costa Rica public art installation, Pieles represents an exciting evolution in his practice — one that MÍRAME looks forward to seeing develop further.
To learn more about Rivera's work or to discuss a commission, please contact Belinda Seppings at MÍRAME: [email protected]Email: [email protected] Follow: Facebook | Instagram