Nohelia Vargas Bolivar

Nohelia Vargas Bolivar is a Venezuelan artist based in Houston. Her work combines painting, sculpture, and animation. She earned her BFA from the University of Houston with an Area of concentration in Painting and Art History, and a MFA from Tufts University. Vargas currently works as a Assistant Curator of Education at the Blaffer Art Museum and as an adjunct professor at University of Houston Clear Lake and Art League.

“Working across painting, sculpture, and animation, my practice is grounded in a strong foundation of traditional painting techniques while moving fluidly between media, with each piece maintaining a commitment to material exploration.

“Drawing from surrealist aesthetics, my work constructs hybrid figures and uncanny narratives that exist between the familiar and the unsettling. Each piece functions as an individual statement, yet collectively my work seeks to deconstruct the concept of humanhood. I am interested in reimagining humans as complex living beings—capable of dreaming, creating, and loving, but also as fragile and contradictory entities whose actions can corrode both their own existence and the world around them.

My process varies depending on the medium. In painting, I work through layered compositions, building symbolic imagery that merges personal narrative with broader cultural references. In animation, particularly stop-motion, I construct scenes frame by frame, allowing transformation and distortion to unfold over time—12 drawings to make a single second of video. Sculpture introduces a tactile dimension, where material becomes a metaphor for the body itself: malleable, artificial, or vulnerable.

Across all media, my work navigates the tension between beauty and discomfort, intention and instinct, critique and desire—ultimately embracing contradiction as an essential part of being human”