Nina Chanel Abney

Nina Chanel Abney is an American artist, based in New York.

She was born in Harvey, Illinois.

She is an African American contemporary artist and painter who explores race, gender, pop culture, homophobia, and politics in her work.

Abney was raised by her mother Karla, her aunt, and her grandparents in Chicago.

Her mother was also an artist, and Abney looked up to her.

Abney used to play with her mother’s oil paints in their basement.

She liked Archie Comics, the Berenstain Bears, and Disney movies, and would mimic characters from them.

After her mother remarried and had a second daughter, the family moved around a lot, and Abney and her sister would often be the only black children in their class at school.

Abney first met her biological father, who is a police officer, when he pulled her mother over for an alleged traffic violation while they were driving through Indiana.

This led her to attend Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois where she received a BFA with a dual major in studio art and computer science in 2004.

While attending college, Abney took part in a campus-wide walkout in protest of the lack of diversity in the faculty, which contributed to the political focus of her art.

After graduating, she took a year off working as an assembly line worker at Ford Motor Company.

She quit after witnessing a co-worker get their leg crushed in an accident.

She began to paint every day and was accepted to the Chicago Art Institute and the Parsons School of Design where she received an MFA in 2007.

In 2015, Abney said that she and her father started to rebuild their relationship.

After a fire at their home, Abney and her mother moved in with her aunt in Matteson, Illinois where she attended Rich South Campus High School.

Abney said that she would get teased about “talking white” by other students.

In order to connect with other students, she would take requests to draw “portraits of famous black figures in pop culture”.

Abney began to explore art more formally in high school.

She always knew that she wanted to be an artist, but she was not sure what that would look like.

She said that it took her a while to find her voice when speaking out about issues that matter to her like the #blacklivesmatter movement.

She is always shocked that her work has been exhibited in museums.

Some of her influences are the animated series South Park and hip-hop music.

She feels that, “anyone can be an artist if they want to create and express themselves.” Her advice to aspiring artists is, “Just do it”.

Her work uses symbols and bright colors to present new ways of approaching loaded topics as she invites viewers to draw their own conclusions.

Blending the playful and the serious, Abney has said that her work is "easy to swallow, hard to digest."

Abney does not plan ahead or sketch, rather she works intuitively and with a rhythm.

“What colors feel right next to each other” improvisation is a large part of her process and she doesn’t know what the end result will be as her work is a response to what she is feeling in the moment.

Jeffery Deitch, an art dealer and curator once compared her skill to that of the artist Keith Haring.

Abney’s style of painting is mostly graphic, cubist, and color blocked paintings and murals, using techniques like spray painting, collaging, and layering shapes and symbols.

She doesn’t want her figures to be “boxed in” and she wants her work to have multiple “answers”.

Abney likes to switch around races and genders in her figures, so the viewer releases traditionally conformed ideas about the painting.

She has stated, "I like to bring everybody's perspective in... I'd approach it from both sides of the story".

She uses symbolic imagery in unconventional ways to portray a deeper message, but also visually keeping the image simple.

For example, in one painting Abney uses a heart in multiple ways that, depending where it is placed and what purpose it has, could have many different meanings.

Additionally, Abney likes to keep humor in her work because the topics of her work are so serious.

She does this by using vibrant colors and drawing “cartoonish” figures.

Abney feels that she works so instinctively now that she doesn’t know how to go back to her old style of painting.

She wants her work to stay relevant and the message of her paintings to adapt to what is relevant in the future, “so it can be read in an entirely new way” as times change.

In high school, Abney was encouraged by one of her teachers to take AP art.