Angeline Rivas, Charm and Strange, 2024, acrylic, gouache, and graphite on panel, 60 x 48 in. Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS, Acquired with funds provided by the Barton P. and Mary D. Cohen Art Acquisition Endowment at the JCCC Foundation. Photo: Chris Sharp Gallery
ON VIEW
THROUGH MAY 3, 2026
Kansas Focus Gallery, First Floor
March 11, 2026, 6-9 PM
Angeline Rivas AND Christina Catherine Martinez Artists Talk, Reception to Follow
Hudson Auditorium and Atrium
No RSVP required to attend in-person
RSVP for livestreaming option
NERMAN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, JOHNSON COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE
FREE and Open to the Public
People have been known to clutch pearls at many things in art: nudity, minimalism, sacrilege. The first is a question of moral symbolism, the second is a derogatory itch—a feeling that the artist hasn’t done enough—and the third is the umbrella term for the other two. The paintings of Angeline Rivas (b. 1981, Kansas City, Missouri) have none of these qualities, not in any imagistic way, anyway. The audible gasps that sometimes meet her pictures have more to do with the feeling that the artist has done too much.
Her compositions begin as soft graphite sketches, sometimes filled in or made entirely with cosmetic makeup, the kind you’re supposed to put on your face before putting on a face for the outside world, or the front-facing camera. Before transmogrifying through the retinal cone-melting colors of her airbrush, her pictures are briefly genteel. Getting them on the canvas is a monastic process of taping off one florid section at a time, giving her shapes their hard edges and soft centers. Rivas leverages the medium with such formal rigor and hysterical detail that her soft studies bloom to interdimensional dimensions, a marriage of spatial depth and an oddly pleasing flatness. Painting is inescapably an experience of time, and Angeline’s paintings physically pulse with it, like a bouquet of multiverses.
There’s a word I’ve been avoiding, hunkered down goblin-style in the uncanny valley between beauty and hideousness. It’s prettiness. That these pictures might be pretty on top of everything else is the chief cause of their offense, but also the engine of their permission, which is the overriding sensation I get from them, and get still from this wild and tasteless country I call home.
The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art is proud to host Angeline Rivas’s first institutional solo exhibition. Learn more about this exhibition at nermanmuseum.org.
—Christina Catherine Martinez, multidisciplinary artist, writer, and comedian
