Kenny Rivero

Last updated
Kenny Rivero
Born (1981-04-11) April 11, 1981 (age 42)
Washington Heights, Manhattan, New York
Education Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2017)
Yale School of Art (MFA, 2012)
School of Visual Arts (BFA, 2006)
Website kennyrivero.com


Kenny Rivero (born 1981, Washington Heights, Manhattan, New York) is a Dominican-American visual artist who makes paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore the complexity of identity through narrative images, collage and assemblage, language, and symbolism. [1] Rivero is currently a Lecturer in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art and a Visiting Artist at The Cooper Union. [2] [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Rivero was born to Dominican parents and raised in Washington Heights, Manhattan, NY. His Dominican-American identity and personal history is central to his work. [4]

He received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (2006), New York, NY, and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT (2012). He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2017. [2]

Work

Rivero is primarily a painter, but also creates drawings, prints, and sculptures. His work engages the deeply personal. [5] His paintings depict spaces and interactions between figures that appear fantastical, dangerous, foreboding, nostalgic, or tender. [6] Figures in his work seem to be spirits, superhuman, or physical representations of psychological states. His paintings often include elements of assemblage, using objects of personal significance, often cherished mementos, or pieces of New York City, for instance, "Old cigarette packs salvaged from the Gramercy building where he worked as a doorman, dominoes fresh from a match: Each of his three-dimensional canvases are a layered “memory palette" [...].” [7]

In an article for Hyperallergic, Benjamin Sutton describes the figures, symbolism, and mysticism in Rivero's painting titled Homage to the Three Three (PE NYK) (2015), "[it] has a ghostly head floating (or painted) on a brick wall. Around the corner flames shoot from a window, while a cluster of numbers apparently tagged on the wall tempt the viewer’s inner cryptographer. [...] Rivero’s piece is full of lovely painterly effects, from the thickening series of lines that make up the figure’s fan-like hair to the precise, Op art-ish grid of brick outlines. The painting is full of opaque symbolism." [8] And in the Brooklyn Rail, Alex Jen describes It Happened on the Corner (2014), on view in Lure of the Dark At Mass MoCA in 2019, "a man lies sick on the ground as pairs of scuffed oxfords walk past. The sidewalk is painted to look like board game tiles. A smoke-stained sliver filled with monsters projects out of his belly like a magnified microscope illustration, and combusts at the bottom in a brilliantly painted fire so thick and crusted it looks whittled." Jen continues by describing the symbolism in another painting, Ask About Me (2017), "A nervous, coded pictograph of one's personal interiors, little crosses mark graves in the dark among pyramids, faceted gems, and empty cars." [9]

Rivero's work aims to capture the supernatural elements of everyday, real experience, intertwining the ways in which reality seem surreal, especially when related to violence, pain, and grief. As described by Paul D'Agostino for L Magazine, Rivero's work, "is full of surprises that are not exactly stunning, terrors that aren’t really scary, notes of humor that aren’t necessarily funny, fantastical figments that are actually just real, and barely nightmarish murmurs that hum, also, in tones of just-awoken awareness, such that the dream is at once active and over. [...] A wonderful walk through the fanciful normalities and quotidian strangenesses of dreams—or of the blurred focus and liminal discomforts of what it looks and feels like to be dreaming. [...] the works lure you in while lulling you deeply into some cognitive elsewhere." [10]

Exhibitions

Selected solo exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions

Awards and residencies

Rivero has been awarded a number of awards and residencies including, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2018), [15] [4] Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2017), The Fountainhead Residency (2016), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015), Roswell Artist in Residence Program (2015-16), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program (2014-2015), Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Travel Grant from Yale University (2011). [2] [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inka Essenhigh</span> American painter

Inka Essenhigh is an American painter based in New York City. Throughout her career, Essenhigh has had solo exhibitions at galleries such as Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, 303 Gallery, Stefan Stux Gallery, and Jacob Lewis Gallery in New York, Kotaro Nukaga, Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo, and Il Capricorno in Venice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Derek Fordjour</span> American artist

Derek Fordjour is an American interdisciplinary artist and educator of Ghanaian heritage who works in collage, video/film, sculpture, and painting. Fordjour lives and works in New York City.

Angela Dufresne is a Brooklyn based American artist known for paintings that explore narrative in a variety of ways. Dufresne holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, MO and an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA. She is currently faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Lois Dodd is an American painter. Dodd was a key member of New York's postwar art scene. She played a large part and was involved in the wave of modern artists including Alex Katz and Yvonne Jacquette who explored the coast of Maine in the latter half of the 20th century.

Harmony Hammond is an American artist, activist, curator, and writer. She was a prominent figure in the founding of the feminist art movement in 1970s New York.

Amy Feldman is an American abstract painter from Brooklyn, New York.

Dawn Clements (1958–2018) was an American contemporary artist and educator. She was known for her large scale, panoramic drawings of interiors that were created with many different materials in a collage-style. Her primary mediums were sumi ink and ballpoint pen on small to large scale paper panels. In order to complete a drawing she cut and pasted paper, editing and expanding the composition to achieve the desired scale. Her completed drawings reveal her working process through the wrinkles and folds evident in the paper. She described her work as "a kind of visual diary of what [she] see[s], touch[es], and desire[s]. As I move between the mundane empirical spaces of my apartment and studio, and the glamorous fictions of movies, apparently seamless environments are disturbed through ever-shifting points of view."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Villalongo</span>

William Villalongo is an American artist working in painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation art. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Villalongo is an associate professor at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.

Regina Bogat is an American abstract artist currently living and working in New Jersey. Married to artist Alfred Jensen, her own artwork was often overlooked in favor of her husband's, although her work has experienced renewed interest from the art world during the past decade. She is best known for the abstract paintings she made in the 1960s and 1970s using cords, wooden strips, and colorful threads.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paula Wilson</span> American artist

Paula Wilson is an African American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.

Brenda Goodman is an artist and painter currently living and working in Pine Hill, New York. Her artistic practice includes paintings, works on paper, and sculptures.

Mark Thomas Gibson is an American visual artist working in painting, print, ink, and watercolor. Gibson's work explores Black representation in the United States using the medium of comics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aisha Tandiwe Bell</span> American visual artist

Aisha Tandiwe Bell is an American visual artist known for her work that creates myth and ritual through mixed media including sculpture performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation that addresses themes of fragmentation, shape-shifting, code-switching, hyphenated identities and multiple consciousness, marginalization, and lack of agency people in the African Diaspora struggle with. Through her mixed media, Aisha Tandiwe Bell's art focuses on and looks at the societal constraints of sex, race, and class. She uses each piece of her art to look at the norms that society has created around sex, race, and class and the limitations that people have placed upon themselves when it comes to these ideas. As a Jamaican-American woman in the United States, Bell uses her art to represent the displacement that she feels and the alter egos that black women have to uphold publicly and privately. The sculptures that Bell creates are intentionally cracked, fragmented, and imperfect to reflect her fractured identity.

Josephine Halvorson is an American contemporary painter, sculptor, and print maker based in Massachusetts. She is best known for her on-site paintings, drawing from scenes of the natural world and everyday life. Her work bends material fact and immaterial illusion. Halvorson is a Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Didier William</span>

Didier William is a mixed-media painter originally from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. His work incorporates traditions in oil painting, acrylic, collage and printmaking to comment on intersections of identity and culture.

Lina Puerta is a Colombian-American mixed media artist based in New York City. She was born in New Jersey and grew up in Colombia.

Marlon Mullen is a painter who lives and works in Contra Costa County, California, maintaining a studio practice at NIAD Art Center.

Doron Langberg is an American painter. Langberg paints in the style of genre painting and portraiture and addresses issues of gender and sexuality by making love and desire a shared experience through the surface and subjects of his paintings.

Caitlin Cherry is an African-American painter, sculptor, and educator.

Katie Ruiz is an Chicana painter, sculptor, and activist that was born in Los Angeles, California but now resides in San Diego, California. She uses her art to depict natural forces and symbolism found in blankets.

References

  1. ↑ "Making Sense of Paintings That Tell Snippets of Stories". Hyperallergic. 2015-04-16. Retrieved 2019-04-11.
  2. 1 2 3 "Yale University School of Art: Kenny Rivero". art.yale.edu. Retrieved 2019-04-11.
  3. ↑ "People | The Cooper Union". cooper.edu. Retrieved 2019-04-11.
  4. 1 2 3 Foundation, Joan Mitchell. "Artist Programs » Artist Grants". joanmitchellfoundation.org. Retrieved 2019-04-20.
  5. ↑ Cotter, Holland (2013-06-13). "Museo del Barrio's 'Bienal 2013' Explores Self and Origins". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2019-04-12.
  6. ↑ Sargent, Antwaun (2018-08-16). "Where 'Block Party' Has a Score of Meanings". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2019-04-12.
  7. ↑ "Amazing on-the-rise New York artists you need to know". Time Out New York. Retrieved 2019-04-12.
  8. ↑ "Making Sense of Paintings That Tell Snippets of Stories". Hyperallergic. 2015-04-16. Retrieved 2019-04-12.
  9. ↑ Jen, Alex (2019-02-14). "The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 2019-04-12.
  10. ↑ "L Rex: Art". The L Magazine. 2015-02-12. Retrieved 2019-04-12.
  11. ↑ "Kenny Rivero". The Delaware Contemporary. Retrieved 2019-04-12.
  12. ↑ "The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night | MASS MoCA". massmoca.org. 2 March 2018. Retrieved 2019-04-12.
  13. ↑ "Black Identity Seen Through the Lens of Pulp Stories". Hyperallergic. 2016-11-08. Retrieved 2019-04-11.
  14. ↑ "Black Pulp!". International Print Center New York. Retrieved 2019-04-12.
  15. ↑ "Joan Mitchell Foundation Names 2018 Grant Recipients". www.artforum.com. Retrieved 2019-04-11.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.