Arica Hilton’s multi-media artworks are exhibited in galleries around the world. Whether it is visual art or poetic expressions of language and music, every aspect of her creativity is geared towards one form of art melding into another.
"As an artist, my interest lies in expressing the inexhaustible combinations of visual and spiritual language. Specifically, I explore free organic forms through the layering and sensual deployment of color. My agenda evolves as each brushstroke responds to another, catching the pure moment of expression.
The subjects transform continuously in their meaning and complexity. There is a raw emotional presence that emanates from the merging of hand, paint, eye and words. Thus, like the tonal qualities in music, my poetry and paintings attempt to touch something universally significant in all human beings -- that meditative state of people seeking their light in the elements of nature and the universe."
~ Arica Hilton
Multi-Media Artworks
Much like luminism, the poetic art movement that captured light as it moved across the American landscape, Hilton’s works are influenced by the European Romanticists. She is inspired by the Romanticists’ depiction of tranquil waterscapes reflecting nuanced skies, though she does not create traditional landscape paintings. Her work takes on a “post-luminist” sensuality that elicits tranquility, calm, and the sense of light piercing a soft, hazy sky. Her art expands to a more ubiquitous aspect of nature, reaching beyond the tangible earth, water and sky, to the star-forming galaxies of the universe.
Hilton has had numerous exhibitions in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. Her series, “I Flow Like Water,” a body of works that highlight issues around water conservation and the problem of plastics weighing down our oceans, was exhibited at the Beirut Art Fair; QU ART in Brussels, Belgium; the Union League Club of Chicago; the Caux Forum for Just Governance and Human Security in Caux, Switzerland and in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Shenzhen, China.
Collaborations
Creating art that aligns with her work as a global advocate for environmental issues is especially rewarding to Hilton. Recent projects include collaborations with environmentally-conscious architects, developers and businesses. She was commissioned to create a monumental 8’ x 18’ painting for the lobby of a LEED Certified Gold building in Chicago. Another project includes a monumental painting for an architecture and engineering firm that specializes in water-based community projects worldwide.
Among her collaborations with artists, Hilton partnered with Italian artist Marco Nereo Rotelli for his exhibition “Words” at Northwestern University in Chicago. They partnered again on “Divina Natura,” an installation at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Rotelli designed the sound and light, and Hilton curated an international roster of poets and wrote and performed the finale poem.
Her monumental painting, Universe, Life Unlimited, was the backdrop for Mythical Proportions, a one-woman play by actress Nora Dunn at Theater Wit in Chicago. According to Ms. Dunn, “your painting became a character in my play.” The painting was later donated by a collector to Mount Sinai Hospital.
Exhibitions
The Collection:
Hilton’s paintings and installations continue to integrate her poetry and three-dimensional materials such as plastics to render them relative to the present while capturing the timeless quality that is ever present in her works.
