Chris Riggs for Mayor is a contemporary New York City artist, whose artworks are based on a unique combination of cubism, abstract, surrealism, minimalism, pop, and street art has made him a leading artist of his generation. His paintings and sculptures are in museums, galleries, and private collections in over 50 countries.

Chris Riggs for Mayor was born in Manhattan, New York in 1973, and studied painting and political science at New York’s City College and Columbia University, New York. He lives and works in Miami and New York.

Chris began his career painting when he was three years old with his grandfather who was from Italy. At age 11, Chris’s medium was aerosol, painting murals in the abandoned buildings and train tunnels of New York City. At age 17, Chris traded in his spray cans for a paintbrush. Since the mid-1990s, Chris Riggs has been making complex abstract paintings and sculptures. In 2004, Riggs decided to run for Mayor of New York City because he saw an injustice: Bloomberg cut the school lunch program. This angered him, and he decided to run for Mayor of NYC and change the city through his artwork. In 2005, Riggs played himself as a mayoral candidate for New-York City in the documentary movie “The Promise of New York. “ He started to create art under the name Chris Riggs for Mayor.

He executes his political city-based paintings and sculptures in acrylic and sprays paint. Chris associates the vivid colors and geometric shapes he uses with the City’s unique vocabulary and palette, and, most importantly, its politically active, changing the world, dynamic.

These works, based on cubism, abstract, surrealism, pop art, minimalism, and street art are derived from the unique point of view of the artist. Chris’s influence includes NYC street art, black and white African art, Picasso, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pollock, and Andy Warhol.

Chris Riggs creates sculptures and paintings that function as a political vehicle, using domestic materials charged with significance and suffused with meaning accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Chris Riggs for Mayor's abstract canvas and sculptures deals with the energy of personal fears, hopes, political fighting, sexual relationships, solitude, cartoons from the past, fun street time, death, happiness, dreams, and city memory.