BRATTLEBORO — On Thursday, April 29, at 7 p.m., the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) will present a live Zoom conversation with Kenny Rivero, a Dominican American artist and musician; gallery director Charles Moffett; and artist and academic Michael Jevon Demps.
The three will discuss Rivero's first solo museum exhibition - “Palm Oil, Rum, Honey, Yellow Flowers,” on view at BMAC through Sunday, June 13 - as well as the commonalities between Rivero's and Demps's work.
Rivero describes his drawings as autobiographical, with themes including masculinity, love, depression, sexuality, Afro Caribbean faith, Anglo Caribbean sensibilities, and Afro-Futurism.
“Rivero often uses found paper for his drawings: flyleaves from paperbacks, record album liners, pages from a family photo album,” curator and BMAC Exhibitions Manager Sarah Freeman wrote in a statement accompanying the exhibit. “The work has a finite lifespan, conveying the ideas of passing time, personal history, and fleeting moments and interactions.”
Born to Dominican parents and raised in New York, Rivero received his B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts and his M.F.A. from Yale University. His work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, Antica Libreria Cascianelli in Rome, and many other venues.
Moffett directs Charles Moffett Gallery, which represents Rivero and five other artists. He is the former vice president and co-head of day sales at Sotheby's and the son of Charles S. Moffett, a prominent curator of Impressionist art.
Demps holds a B.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts and an M.F.A. from Yale. His work has been exhibited nationally and abroad and was included in the 2017 exhibition “Fictions” at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
To register, visit brattleboromuseum.org.