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Nina Chanel Abney

Career
In 2007, Abney got her first big break for her painting Class of 2007, which she painted for her MFA thesis show. The painting is a diptych. In one panel, she is depicted as a blonde officer carrying a gun. In the second panel, her MFA classmates, all white, are painted as black inmates in orange uniforms. The painting was purchased by the Rubell family, owners of the Rubell Museum in Miami, Florida.

She is best known for her colorful graphic large-scale paintings, four of which are included in the 30 Americans exhibition organized by the Rubell Museum of works by African American artists of the last three decades, which has toured museums and galleries in America since 2008. Her work has also appeared in the Whitney Museum, the Jack Shainman Gallery, as well as the Kravets Wehby Gallery in Chelsea.

Dirty Wash was Abney's first show, hosted at Kravets/Wehby gallery in the spring of 2008. Attracting many major collectors, the show sold out within days.

Nina Chanel Abney has been a lecturer for universities and visual arts centers across the nation. In 2013, she was a guest lecturer at the New York Academy of Art and in 2015 she presented at the Summit Series in Utah.

In November 2017, she had her first solo show at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City, "Nina Chanel Abney: Seized the Imagination." This exhibition ran concurrently with "Safe House," a solo show curated by Piper Marshall at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York City. The artist is known for her colorful canvases, which are at times frenzied or chaotic, packed with pop culture imagery and references to current events. Abney locates much of her work in the recognition that abuse and violence are an integral part of the everyday consciousness of people of color. Abney’s aim in both shows is to combat the negative stereotypes with which the mainstream media often portrays African Americans. In December 2017, Abney created her first 3D installation at 29Rooms in LA in collaboration with Google Pixel called Fair Grounds: an interactive experiential series of sculptures that evokes the childhood look and feel of a playground.

Her first solo exhibition in a museum, Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in February 2017. Curated by Marshall N. Price, the exhibition included about 30 of her paintings, watercolors, and collages and spans 10 years of her work. The works contain a wide range of art historical references, including medieval icons, Northern Renaissance still lifes, and artists such as Henri Matisse and John Wesley. They illustrate narcissism, celebrity culture, the objectification of women, issues of race, and police brutality.

In her February 2018 exhibition ''[https://www.palaisdetokyo.com/en/event/nina-chanel-abney Hot to Trot. Not.]'' at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Abney created site specific murals along the institution’s main stairwell. One depicts the busts of three black women against a yellow background, the numbers 1, 2, 3 listed under each one. Next to the figures, Abney painted “WHAT?” in black letters — provoking viewers to look at the composition and then think critically about its meaning.

In September of 2018, Abney curated a group exhibition at the Jeffery Deitch gallery entitled Punch. The exhibition called upon current socio-political issues. The exhibition featured Abney herself and some of her close friends. There were paintings, photographs and sculptures included in the exhibition.

Countless news sources have discussed Abney's attempts to address radical political topics by blending genders and race. Some of these sources include the Huffington Post, Forbes and Elle Magazine.