Erik Valera Art Logo, Erik Valera in a half circle, with a red dot below

Erik Valera Fine Art

Featured Series

You Belong By Design

Transforming the political campaign sign into a surface the system isn’t designed to see

Erik Valera planting campaign sign, Erik Valera for Chapel Hill Town Council

Expressionist acrylic paintings on repurposed corrugated polypropylene — political campaign signs from Erik Valera’s Town Council candidacies in Chapel Hill, NC. 16 × 23.5 inches. The substrate is the message.

Rendered in Valera’s signature style — expressive, abstract, high-chroma — this reclaimed politically charged advertising is transformed into objects that reframe how we see and experience our cities. The series uses abstract painting to deconstruct the language patterns, design and regulation of our built environment through the lens of New Urbanism — an urban design movement that advocates for environmentally friendly, densely populated, walkable neighborhoods that reduce car dependency and promote active transportation. The compositions, text, and annotations examine the systemic restructuring of land-use policy — asking whose belonging is assumed and whose belonging is negotiated.

Valera has served as a Chapel Hill planning commissioner and ran twice for Town Council in a town being reshaped by New Urbanist ideals and caught between displacement, affordability, and its stated commitment to inclusion. He has engaged community members and elected officials on these issues in public forums, and has advised planners and officials on the themes the work presents. This series examines that tension from within the system

About

Erik Valera

I am an artist based in Chapel Hill. My artwork is deeply rooted in my experience navigating the world through a disparate cultural lens. With both Mexican and Cuban heritage, I was raised within Hispanic-Latino communities in Miami, then Los Angeles, before arriving in North Carolina.

My art is an expression of my experience and identities. 

My artwork is known for being bold and colorful. It is an invitation for you to contemplate and feel the world as it could be. I make abstract expressionist work as a tool to activate social change. I make art as a contribution to culture and to bring communities together. His work is a reminder to celebrate people whose thoughts and expressions vary from our own.  

Erik serves on the NC Governor’s Advisory Council of Hispanic/Latino Affairs, The Chapel Hill Planning Commission, and Carrboro Business Alliance Leadership Council, in addition to his advisory roles at the Duke Cancer Institute and HIV cure research.