We’re so excited for Angeline and Christina’s talk tonight!
Curious to know more about Christina, the moderator?
Christina Catherine Martinez (website, opens in new tab)
Did you know you can hear Christina reading her essay about Angeline’s work on our digital guide?
Angeline Rivas – Bloomberg Connects Guide (opens in new tab)
Installation image of Angeline Rivas: I Had a Dark Night of the Soul and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
March is a busy month at the Nerman Museum!
Earlier this week, we hosted Olathe Leadership Lowrider Bike Club students for a mini-pop up and awards to support them in the next steps of their educational and artistic careers.
Photo: Susan McSpadden, JCCC Photographer
Photo: Susan McSpadden, JCCC Photographer
Here is what else is coming up this month. We hope to see you at one or more of these events and special installations!
Angeline Rivas, Charm and Strange (detail), 2024, acrylic, gouache, and graphite on panel, 60 x 48 in. Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS, Acquired with funds provided by the Barton P. and Mary D. Cohen Art Acquisition Endowment at the JCCC Foundation. Photo: Chris Sharp Gallery
Angeline Rivas Artist Talk and Reception
Wednesday, March 11 • 6-8 PM
Hudson Auditorium • Livestream option available
FREE – RSVP Requested
Artist Michael Brantley
Michael Brantley Artist Talk and Reception
Sunday, March 22 • 3-5 PM
Hudson Auditorium • Livestream option available
FREE – RSVP Requested
Band Weaving Workshop with Rebecca Vaughan at The Salon
Wednesday, March 25 • 5:30-6:30 PM
FREE – Space is limited • RSVP required
Trespassers Beware! Fort Conley and Wyandot Women Warriors, 2025 installation view. Photo: Deanna Johnson
Special Installation: Trespassers Beware! Fort Conley and Wyandot Women Warriors
On view March 24 through May 22, 2026
Regnier Center South Lawn
Co-directed by the Wyandot Nation of Kansas and Monumenta, in collaboration with lead artists Omakyehstih Collective, Trespassers Beware! Fort Conley and Wyandot Women Warriors is a mobile monument that illuminates the story of the Wyandot Conley sisters who occupied their family’s cemetery to save it from urban development. The monument reimagines Fort Conley, the small dwelling the sisters built inside the Wyandot National Burying Ground and inhabited for years to defend their family’s graves. Their decades-long activism and legal arguments protected this sacred land, impacting preservation and tribal sovereignty movements.
This multimedia installation is based on a replica of the historic fort and incorporates video, music, writing, interpretation, oral histories, an original performance, and more to share the story.
Trespassers Beware! is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Arts/ArtsHERE, in partnership with Mid-America Arts Alliance, the Mellon Foundation, Humanities Kansas, Kansas Studies Institute, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College, the Wyandot Nation of Kansas, the Kansas Arts Commission and individual donors.
We’ve been getting quite a few visitors asking museum staff if someone has drawn on Angeline’s paintings. We appreciate folks looking closely and alerting us to things!
Angeline draws on her own paintings! The size of her marks (often very small), and the fact that they are mostly embedded in the otherwise pristine looking fields of color, so meticulously created, makes them surprising. Take a look next time you’re at the museum and see how many you can spot.
What Easter eggs can you find?
Many thanks to docent Margaret and staff member Julian for getting this list started. Let us know if you notice something that’s not on the list!
The amazing exhibition of abstract, air-brushed paintings by Angeline Rivas has a lot of little secrets to find for those looking and reading closely. The essay, written by a friend of Angeline, Christina Catherine Martinez, is eloquent but may leave some visitors still scratching their heads.
To help dig into some of the specific reference points, one of our Student Aides Mayte typed up some info about Angeline that she shared with us:
Angeline Rivas (spring exibition 2026)
Next time you are at the museum, make sure you look closely – there’s some tiny and subtle details to be found in the works, especially along the edges and corners. The name Buddy appears several times – that’s Angeline’s dog. And Carl refers to Carl Sagan.
Left: Linda Lighton, Nude Descending a Staircase, 2007, glazed earthenware with china paint and luster, 18 x 11 ½ x 5 ½ in. Collection Shook, Hardy, & Bacon L.L.P. Right: Linda Lighton, Tinkerbelle, 2007, glazed earthenware with china paint and luster, 14 ½ x 13 x 12 in. Courtesy the Artist
Linda Lighton: Love & War, A Fifty-Year Survey, 1975-2025 brings with it two opportunities!
We’ll also discuss updates to what’s on view, both in our permanent collection and temporary exhibition spaces, Nerman Museum resources available to educators, and other types of educational opportunities that can be created for your students right here at the Nerman Museum! This preview is one hour long, and educators will be able to select their timeslot – either 4-5 PM or 5-6 PM – upon registration.
Join us for an artist talk with Linda Lighton at our Hudson Auditorium, celebrating the opening of the Linda Lighton: Love & War, A Fifty-Year Survey, 1975-2025. A reception in the Museum’s atrium will follow the talk. The artist talk will be available via livestream. RSVP to receive the livestream link.
Amy Kligman: The Salon for Possible Futures
The Salon‘s calendar of events continues with a Collective Imagining Circle: 2026 on Saturday, December 13 from 1-2:30 PM. This event is free, but space is limited and RSVP is required.
Angeline Rivas, Charm and Strange (detail), 2024, acrylic, gouache, and graphite on panel, 60 x 48 in. Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS, Acquired with funds provided by the Barton P. and Mary D. Cohen Art Acquisition Endowment at the JCCC Foundation. Photo: Chris Sharp Gallery
Angeline Rivas: I Had a Dark Night of the Soul and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
On view December 13, 2025 through May 3, 2026
Kansas Focus Gallery, First Floor
The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art is proud to host Angeline Rivas’s first institutional solo exhibition. Painted with airbrush on wood panel and canvas, the works of Angeline Rivas are vast, yet compact crucibles of a unique form of western Americana. Unlike typical airbrush paintings, Rivas’s works have a way of disclosing, as opposed to effacing, facture via imperfections, pieces of tape, and small moments of graffiti, making it such that the work has carved out a singular space for itself both on a formal and a conceptual level. Rivas (b. 1981) was born and raised in Kansas City, MO and is now based in Los Angeles, CA. Rivas earned her MFA in 2022 from the ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA and her BFA in 2005 from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA.
Michael Brantley, The First Lady of Song, c. 2012, oil on canvas, 50 x 52 x 2 in. Courtesy the Artist
Visionary: The Work of Michael Brantley
On view December 13, 2025 through May 3, 2026
McCaffree Gallery, Second Floor
Guest curated by artist Harold Smith, Visionary, Brantley’s first institutional solo exhibition, will feature the elegant and sophisticated work of painter Michael Brantley, a master painter whose stunning work and practice compellingly encapsulates the love, fears, hopes, and dreams within the Black experience. Michael Brantley (b. 1970) is a multi-disciplinary figurative artist living and working in Kansas City, Missouri. Using oil paint as his preferred medium, his work reflects and celebrates the lifestyle, heritage, and culture of American Africans. Brantley’s art inspires, informs, and provokes dialogue. His large-scale monochromatic paintings in the jazz aesthetic have been spotlighted by the NFL and exhibited at the American Jazz Museum and at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
Special closures: Café Tempo will be closed Dec. 10 for a special event and Dec. 13, 2025-Jan. 19, 2026 for JCCC’s Winter Break. The Nerman Museum will be closed Dec. 24, 2025-Jan. 5, 2026 for JCCC’s Winter Break.