Artist to Watch: Nina Chanel Abney
Nina Chanel Abney was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1982. She took a BFA in 2004 from Augustana College, Rock Island, IL, and her MFA from Parsons School of Design, New York, NY in 2007. Abney was signed on the basis of a single painting from her MFA exhibition at Parsons. Her initial exhibition sold out and she found her way into the 2008 exhibition, "30 Americans" which focused on the "most important African American artists of the last 3 decades". She has shown alongside Kara Walker, Robert Colescott, Kehinde Wiley, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Ms. Abney was signed on the basis of a single painting with gallery owner Marc Wehby for a show at his Chelsea gallery. The painting was a large-scale work from her M.F.A. thesis show at Parsons titled Class of 2007, which depicted her fellow classmates, who were all white, as black inmates, while Nina, the only black student in her class, painted herself as a gun-toting white prison guard with flowing blonde locks.
Wehby's instincts were right; at her initial exhibition, every piece sold withing days. Class of 2007 was purchased by the famed art collectors Don and Mera Rubell based on a photograph of the piece, an amazing feat in and of itself, especially in pre-Instagram days. That work and several others found its way into 2008’s inaugural exhibition of “30 Americans,” a group show that the Rubell’s Web site claims focuses on “the most important African American artists of the last three decades.”
By October 2015, Abney had her fourth solo exhibition, entitled, Always a Winner. She saw her work exhibited alongside the likes of Kara Walker, Nick Cave, Robert Colescott, Kehinde Wiley, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—to whom the artist is frequently compared—for the traveling exhibition’s ninth incarnation, at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Nicole Chanel Abney's paintings fuse the flat collage-like elements and bright saturated colors of early Modernists such as Matisse...
...Fernand Léger...
...and especially Stuart Davis...
... with aspects drawn from Pop Artists such as Alex Katz...
... Richard Lindner...
...and R.B. Kitaj...
... as well as African American artists like W.H. Johnson...
...Willie Torbert...
...Romare Bearden...
...and Jacob Lawrence...
Abney also freely embraces elements of popular culture ranging from TV and films, children’s books and movies...
... to graffiti, hip-hop, and South Park.
While the issues of race and police violence and a playfully ferocious effort to keep the Black Lives Matter life raft afloat are central to her paintings, Abney admits, “I’m not going to give you one story because I’m more than one thing,” says Abney. “Whatever I feel like painting, I just paint it. For me, nothing is off-limits.”
Politics, race, celebrity gossip, sex, literature and a whole lot of colors are jumbled together and teased out to create an ADD sequel to Paul Gauguin’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?“ In an earlier interview with the Huffington Post, Abney explained her inspirations: “In one day, I may read the paper, get on the Internet and browse through YouTube, my Facebook timeline, look at Twitter, watch the news, watch Bravo, VH1, read gossip blogs, listen to music, and do this all while talking on the phone and texting, so it’s impossible for me not to cover a multitude of topics. I’m living in an age of information overload.”
Nicole Chanel Abney is definitely one artist to watch.