Several years ago, when Alison Byrne and Heather Hakimzadeh began mapping out the exhibitions to mark the opening of Virginia MOCA’s sleek new facility, all roads led to Nina Chanel Abney. As executive director and senior curator, respectively, they knew her deceptive lightheartedness, vibrant color palette and emoji-inspired imagery in paintings, collages and sculptures would seduce viewers into, as Abney has said, staying in front of the work long enough to find their place in it.
Abney describes her use of color as creating “familiarity, even pleasure” so that it “draws people in before they have had time to think about whether they want to engage.” The tension between the seduction of her candy colors and what the work is exploring below the surface “is very much part of the point.”
The new Virginia MOCA, on the campus of Virginia Wesleyan University, opens on Saturday with two signature exhibitions: "Seamless: Art and Design" and "Nina Chanel Abney: The Pursuit of Happiness."
Abney is one of the most acclaimed voices in contemporary art, sometimes compared with Keith Haring; Abney was included in “30 Americans,” a seminal exhibition of Black artists that opened in 2008 and toured for more than a decade. In addition to international exhibitions and major public commissions, such as at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, her work is collected by the likes of New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Her earliest art influence occurred on a school field trip from her southside Chicago suburb to the Art Institute, where she encountered “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” a large 19th-century pointillist painting by Georges Seurat, and another monumental piece by photorealist portraitist Chuck Close. Though her work has a greater stylistic kinship with Stuart Davis or Jacob Lawrence, it was the scale of those pieces that created a lasting impression. She later earned her Master of Fine Arts from the Parsons School of Design in 2007, where one of her professors encouraged her to embrace the imposing scale for which she has become known.
Her comfort zone is working as large as possible because it leaves more room to “create a world,” and that world is one of simultaneous clarity and ambiguity. The flat, saturated color and clean, precise edges of her acrylic paintings and collages—the result of masking, stenciling and masterful cutting—are clear as a bell. The meaning is intentionally open for interpretation, fighting against what she calls a “definitive narrative.”
Take the so-called American Dream. She wrote in an email interview that the MOCA exhibition explores “the gap between the promise and the lived experience,” with the latter more complicated and contingent than the myth of meritocracy would have people believe. She wants viewers to sit with the contradictions that exist depending on “who you are, what systems you are moving through, and what history you are carrying,” reflecting on what is concealed and what is revealed in their own pursuits.
In “Heads of State” from 2024, Abney manipulates her flat planes of overlapping color to juxtapose her vocabulary of heads and hands with a flag that leans American and Pan-African and an eagle bearing references to male and female anatomy. Numbers make their enigmatic appearance in the form of three blue disks, each encircling a figure clad in a black robe and labeled 1 through 3. Elsewhere is the number 66—or an inverted 99—USA and SCREE plus an extra E, a lone S and several Xs. While the piece is clearly about patriotism, identity, gender and power structures, what exactly is being communicated is far less clear. And that is by design.
Inspired by current events, especially as they relate to identity within sociocultural systems, Abney seeks multiple possibilities and meanings. “Numbers,” she wrote in the email exchange, “can suggest measurement, value, ranking, and the quantification of experience. They carry an authority that is often accepted without question. Xs can signal negation, error, censorship, or selection depending on context. Hands can be about actions, but also direction, control, and sometimes restriction. I think of them as tools inside of the image.”
Abney’s bold, graphic style is widely recognized and is, at least in part, an homage to her fondness for satirical cartoons such as "South Park," which took on controversial topics with a high degree of audience tolerance. Like shows of that ilk, her use of flat figuration—which was born as a rebellion against the graduate school bias toward illusionistic painting—is visually accessible, yet carries “more complex or uncomfortable ideas underneath.” She wrote that advertising and cartoons “showed me that compression can be a form of power.” It is not about simplifying so much as “sharpening intention,” with every aspect carrying its weight.
Her ability to create a conceptual and visual push-and-pull encourages viewers to grapple with diverse perspectives on loaded topics that, as she said, have been in existence forever, but have boiled over in more recent times. From social injustice, sexuality, and celebrity to race and religion, topics in her work become what she has described as “easy to swallow, hard to digest.”
In “I Am—Somebody” from 2022, a mesmerizing bright red, plaid background provides a foil for two pairs of figures of indeterminate gender dressed in soft pink and baby blue. On the right side of the diptych, one person wearing shorts holds a basketball while the other, wearing nail polish, is dressed in a sweatshirt emblazoned with the word “college.” On the left, one wears a long-sleeve, V-neck sweater and the other a varsity jacket. Each side is captioned with the words “I AM A.” Again, viewers are obviously invited to consider their assumptions about identity, gender and stereotyping, but with less-than-obvious takeaways.
Her collages and paintings require discipline yet serve different purposes in her practice. She explains that, while the cutting phase of collage is meticulous, the composing is fluid, adjustable and experimental. Decisions made when painting, however, are difficult to undo, especially for this artist, who is known for not using traditional preparatory sketches.
Still, considerable preparation takes place. She builds a library with “a vocabulary specific to that body of work.” She then creates stencils or collage pieces; she responds to what is happening on the canvas, using her physical components as the guardrails that allow her “to work intuitively without losing direction.”
Her foray into murals provides a place to “experiment more freely, formally, and conceptually.” But she also appreciates the opportunity for this work to “exist outside a traditional gallery context,” noting that scale and placement “shift who encounters it and how.”
For MOCA, she capitalized on scale, creating an indoor mural installation entitled “Held.” This five-panel piece “explores how grief, resistance, humor, and survival exist, inside the same structure that produces instability.”
Also stepping outside galleries and museums are Abney’s collaborations with the likes of Timberland, with whom she collaborated on the Future73 Capsule celebrating the Original Timberland Boot’s 50th anniversary.
This fashion design fusion inspired the "Seamless" exhibition, which features 15 artists who are also designers, such as Shepard Fairey. See what happens when typography, illustration, and street culture infuse the work of creatives apart from their day jobs.
Virginia MOCA, 5811 Wesleyan Drive, Virginia Beach, VA; www.virginiamoca.org
