In the late 70s, Rafael Bensuaski Vieira and his family migrated to Miami, Florida, from São Paulo, Brasil. Growing up amongst Cuban-Americans’ social criticism of Fidel Castro’s Communist regime gave Rafael an appreciation of our ability to freely critique our government through art. Rafael later moved to the Bay Area to study fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. After crisscrossing the country a few times, including a stint in rural and conservative Georgia, Rafael is now a Bay Area Artist whose work can be characterized by his drive to examine the issues faced by the United States and his tendency toward social criticism.

Rafael and his family arrived in the States without the proper documentation to work and in their own financial crisis. In today’s political climate, they would be referred to as illegal aliens. In addition to factory work, his grandfather raised money by introducing Rafael as a child to a game called treasure hunt. The hunting was Dumpster diving, and renewed trash was sold for the treasure of cash. This thrill of ‘gifting’ with recycled goods has transferred to Rafael’s conceptual art with the use of found objects. Overwhelmed by the current economic state, he was influenced to convert trash to treasure and explore the use of recycled goods as artistic tools. Recycled artifacts tie us to our past while reflecting our present, in which many face a return to poverty.

Simultaneously he's also working on "Intertwining Kingdoms" a refreshing series that stimulates viewer to explore their subconscious minds by immersing them in an abstract conceptual space consisting of free flowing lines and organic forms. These lines and forms have identities in and of themselves. They resemble the atmospheres of his  memorable life occurrences, which derive from extreme human social behaviors.