Photo by Megan Maloy
BIO
CHERYL R. RILEY is a multi-media artist, furniture designer, and art advisor. She creates wall art, sculptures, wearable art such as sculptures in the form of a necklace, installations, site-specific public artworks, and custom designs for corporate titans and celebrity clients. Her artworks are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, the Smithsonian Museum of African American History & Culture, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Mint Museum of Art & Design in Charlotte, NC, the Oakland Museum, the Museum of Arts & Design (MAD) in New York City, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, Cuba.
Her public works include the San Francisco Bayview Police Station Public Lobby and Community Conference Room, an entry wall mural in the Sacramento Pannell Meadowview Community Center, Gothic/Kuba Glass Window Panels I–IV in the City University of New York's Sheppard Hall, and African Textiles Glass Panels I–V in the Atlanta Hartsfield Airport’s T Terminal. She is a former board member at several museums as well as a participant in the first site-specific artist residency in the U.S.—Capp Street Project. In 2023, she joined the Executive and Finance Boards of the Museum of Arts & Design (MAD) in New York City for a second term.
A recent commission is the World History I (Drum), 2024 table for the Brooklyn Museum. After returning from a loan to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, her Zulu Renaissance Writing Table for a Lady (1995) was on view in the Surreal Connections permanent collection gallery of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Its popularity with visitors led to the extension of its display and the creation of a film about this sculpture. She is also a former board member at several museums and organizations such as SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art), as well as a participant in the Capp Street Project. She joined the Executive and Finance Boards of the Museum of Arts & Design (MAD) in New York City for a second term in 2024.
Currently, she is creating a furniture design in conversation with the late Wharton Esherick for the LongHouse Reserve Museum in East Hampton, NY. She is an NEA Individual Artist Grant recipient, among others. She has won fellowships and attended numerous artist residencies and was a fellow at the Frank Lloyd Wright Martin House compound in Buffalo, New York, in the fall of 2024.
Cheryl occasionally provides art advisory services for collectors such as television, movie, and Broadway actor Jesse Williams. She has also curated collections for a condo development in Harlem and for corporations such as BET. Her focus for decades in this practice has been—and continues to be—artists of the Black African Diaspora.
You may view my resume here.
MEDIA
Museum of Art and Design: Artist Interview 2000