Pilar Tompkins Rivas is Director of Residency Programs at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. She has served as arts project coordinator at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, curator of the Claremont Museum of Art and director of the Latin American branch of the Artist Pension Trust. As part of the Getty Research Institute’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, she curated Civic Virtue: The Impact of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and the Watts Towers Arts Center for the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in addition to co-curating the suite of exhibitions, L.A. Xicano, at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, LACMA and the Autry National Center.

Her many projects include Bas Jan Ader: Suspended Between Laughter and Tears, at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and Museo de Arte Zapopan, Mexico; Citizen, Participant at Darb 1718 Art Center in Cairo, Egypt; L’Ottava Tavola: An Etymology of Contemporary Codes at the Museum of the City of Cortona, Italy; Suelto at La Central gallery in Bogotá, Colombia; Post American L.A. at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California; and Multiverse, The Passerby Museum and Vexing: Female Voices from East L.A. Punk at the Claremont Museum of Art, the latter of which represented the City of Los Angeles at the 2009 Guadalajara International Book Fair.