Professor Kenny Rivero Exhibits 'Ash on Everything' at Charles Moffett
Ash on Everything marks Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Kenny Rivero's first solo exhibition in New York in over three years and his fifth with Charles Moffett gallery.
The show features new paintings that further Rivero's aim of deconstructing the histories and identities he has been raised to understand as absolute. Born in Washington Heights to Dominican parents and now based in the Bronx, his work investigates the stories he has been told about Dominican American identity, socio-geographic solidarity, familial expectations, race, and gender roles.
In this latest work, Rivero takes what he views as a broken narrative and reenvisions it as a holistic, alternative world. In Red Rarri With a Baddie (8" x 8", oil on linen over panel, 2025), the only fragments of a figure visible are two sets of glowing eyes emerging from the red interior of the vehicle. In Shadow Mirror (70" x 70", oil on linen, 2025), a boy wearing a slight halo fastens himself to clouds which are painted with the weight of stones.
The landscape of Rivero's paintings is familiar yet otherworldly, heavy and light. While conceptually complex, the paintings are also delightful for their soft, layered materiality. His figures engage in resistance resonant with human struggles, but are endowed with power and vision that stretch beyond our ability.
In the three years since Rivero’s last exhibition in New York, he has had solo exhibitions in cities around the world, including in London, U.K. and Los Angeles, C.A. Also in that time, his work has joined the permanent collections of several major museums including the Norton Museum in Palm Beach, Florida, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, TX, where his work was exhibited in the 2024 exhibition Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940.
Kenny Rivero is a New York born, New York based artist. Spanning painting, collage, drawing, and sculpture, Rivero's work explores the complexity of identity through narrative images, language, and symbolism. Rivero cites the hybrid qualities of salsa, hip-hop, house music, jazz, and merengue—as well as Vodun and Santeria, which were present in his daily life growing up—as core influences in the studio. His work is represented in notable public collections including The Baltimore Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Collection of Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL. He holds an MFA from Yale School of the Arts and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Ash on Everything is on view at Charles Moffett, 394 Broadway, December 11, 2025–January 24, 2026. In the week ahead of the opening, Charles Moffett is presenting a small selection of Rivero’s new paintings in a solo booth at NADA Miami, on view December 2–6, 2025.