Editors’ Picks: 8 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week

Kenny Rivero, The Passion (2020). Courtesy of Charles Moffett Gallery.

6. “Kenny Rivero: I Still Hoop” at Charles Moffett Gallery

When Kenny Rivero began his new series of paintings currently on view at Charles Moffett Gallery he knew that death, and its rituals, would be their unifying theme. He could not have known how this year would bring the realities of death—particularly in Black and brown communities—so painfully into focus. Raised in Washington Heights, Rivero grew up in a Catholic Dominican family—but with relatives who continued the Afro-Caribbean traditions of Voodoo and Santeria. These disparate references combined in 14 haunting new paintings that together appear like a fever dream of mourning, ritual, and traditions more than of anything of the real world. “The more mystical aspects of my own spiritual practice are where my faith comes into the paintings,” Rivero stated of the series. But the paintings are not at all doom-and-gloom. Perhaps unexpectedly, one finds a sense of hope and resilience in the works—amid the darkened corners to his paintings appear light-filled windows and street lamps casting halos on the darkened city streets.