Angeline Rivas: I Had a Dark Night of the Soul and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt installation view, December 13, 2025 – May 3, 2026, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas. Photo: EG Schempf
Entrancing colors appear to flow in tightly controlled fashion on the panels created by contemporary Mexican American painter Angeline Rivas, a Kansas City native currently based in Los Angeles. I Had a Dark Night of the Soul and All I Got Was This Lousy T‑Shirt is her first institutional solo exhibition, radiating a quiet optimism in a white-walled gallery at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.
Art critic and writer Christina Catherine Martinez, who led an artist talk with Rivas at the Nerman Museum on March 11, noted a “tension between old things and new things” that anchors the art of Rivas.
Using acrylic, gouache, and graphite in Charm and Strange and other works, Rivas wields an air brush and applies hand-torn masking tape to create layered patterns. Her methodical process requires patience, as each layer is meticulously masked in sections, obscuring portions of the panel, while a specific area undergoes “micro passes.” Rivas describes the process as generative, working “blind and reaching out into the dark.” Each air-brushed pass must dry before she proceeds with another layer. Rivas “builds bit by bit” on multiple paintings in her studio, often as music or episodes of Star Trek play in the background.
From hot pink to radiant blues, her color palette is assertive and unapologetic, holding space for a science fiction-fueled optimism, somewhere within the aspiration for an imagined modern utopia and resistance to the acceptance of impending dystopia.
Implied movement in her works draws the eye. Intricate curves and details transfix and beckon the viewer to visually roam without hurry. Innate pattern processing in the human brain makes the flow and repetition of these shapes pleasing at first glance.
Studying the edges and corners of her work, signs of the human hand are evident, from intentional splotches left by cleaning out her air brush, to markings left by Rivas. Intentionally, Rivas is “going for a hand aesthetic that is not too finished.” These details call to mind marginalia found in the margins of a book, idiosyncratic notes and marks that are additive, personal and complementary. With human-made elements and by-products of her process, Rivas leaves her definitive mark even though she rarely signs her own name on her art, as Martinez observed.
Beneath the surface, her abstract paintings represent no specific discernible object or landscape. They defy categorization and resist the gratification of completing a crossword puzzle. No easy answers here. From organic to cosmic, transcendentalism to utopia/dystopia, pop culture to science and mathematics, Rivas produces art with multiple touchpoints to deeply contemplate.
“Angeline Rivas: I Had a Dark Night of the Soul and All I Got Was This Lousy T‑Shirt” continues at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, 12345 College Blvd., Overland Park, Kan.., through May 3. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. For more information, 913.469.3000 or nermanmuseum.org.
