Nina Chanel Abney: Fishing Was His Life

East Gallery

October 01, 2022 — March 05, 2023

Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982, Chicago, IL) makes paintings, prints, and large-scale murals with layered compositions and fragmented narratives that explore themes of politics, race, sexuality, and celebrity. Hard-edged, vibrant, and often dense with geometric symbols and shapes, her figural works are influenced by the dynamics of our contemporary media landscape. Self-describing her images as “colorfully seductive” and “deceptively simple,” Abney’s work is visually alluring while it engages pressing and significant social issues.

Abney’s exhibition at the Henry includes recent collages and new paintings that center the rich culture and commerce of fishing within the African American community. Her work celebrates a long legacy of identity and self-determination intimately entangled with coastal fisheries while also conjuring the structural inequities that threaten Black life and livelihoods within the industry.

Abney’s exhibition extends outdoors with an exterior mural on the Henry’s east façade that provocatively stages the seafood market, evoking relationships between racialized bodies, commodities, and consumption.

Artist Bio

Born 1982 in Chicago; lives and works in New York

Nina Chanel Abney earned her BFA from Augustana College and her MFA from the Parsons School of Design. Abney’s solo museum exhibition Royal Flush (2017) at the Nasher Museum of Art, North Carolina, traveled to the Chicago Cultural Center; Institute of Contemporary Art and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. Abney has exhibited widely in additional solo presentations and group shows at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. Abney has created multiple site-specific, public commissions, including most recently a major project for the World Center, Miami and another at the David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, New York that will open in fall 2022. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Bronx Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Rubell Family Collection; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Burger Collection, Hong Kong.

Publication

CREDITS

Nina Chanel Abney: Fishing Was His Life is organized by Nina Bozicnik. The collages on view in the exhibition are the culmination of Abney’s 2020 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship. Media sponsorship generously provided by KEXP.