James Rizzi (* October 5, 1950 in New York City; † December 26, 2011 in New York City) was an American artist and painter. He is classified as a Pop artist.

Rizzi was born to an Irish mother and an Italian father and grew up as one of three children in the New York City borough of Brooklyn on East 8th Street. Rizzi graduated from Holy Innocents Grammar School in Brooklyn and attended Erasmus High School, also in Brooklyn. From 1969, he studied art at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Already during his studies, he explored the combination of painting and sculpture and eventually developed the technique of 3D graphics, which he frequently used. After graduating in 1974, he had the opportunity to present his work to the public for the first time at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. As his popularity grew, galleries and museums began to take an interest in his work, but Rizzi also found a broad field of activity outside of painting, designing, among other things, record/CD covers, animated music videos, and a wide variety of everyday objects, from telephone cards to Rosenthal porcelain. Numerous solo exhibitions and awards followed, and during his lifetime, James Rizzi was one of the most popular contemporary Pop Art artists.

Rizzi's works often focus on his hometown of New York and its inhabitants. The images are usually characterized by an almost childlike, naive simplicity and very bright colors, radiating cheerfulness, urban joie de vivre, and optimism, which earned him the nickname "Urban Primitive Artist" from the art press.

In his characteristic three-dimensional construction technique, the foreground elements are cut out of a duplicate of the image, which serves as the background, and placed into a second image plane using bridges made of foam or similar materials. This creates a 3D effect for the viewer, also due to the resulting shadows, created by the two levels.