Nina Chanel Abney

Temporary Friends

2019

Through her contemporary large-scale paintings and Pop art-influenced figurative sculptures, artist Nina Chanel Abney explores a diverse range of subjects, from race, religion and politics to celebrity, sex and art history. Abney describes her art’s effect as “information overload balanced with a kind of spontaneous order” — a representation of life in the 21st century. 

Abney was born in 1982 in Harvey, Illinois, a Chicago suburb where, as a child, she would draw characters from the cartoons she watched on television. She later studied studio art and computer science at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Parsons School of Design in New York. 

A painting from her master’s thesis titled Class of 2007, in which she depicts her white classmates as Black inmates and herself as a white prison guard, was included in the traveling exhibition “30 Americans”. The show featured the works of 30 notable African American artists and premiered at the Rubell Museum in 2008. In 2017, Abney’s first solo museum exhibition, “Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush,” was presented at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in North Carolina. The show traveled to the Chicago Cultural Center, Los Angeles’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the California African American Museum and the Neuberger Museum of Art in New York. 

Although Abney is best known for her vividly colorful, cartoonish paintings, she has also gained recognition for her abstract and still-life sculptures. These include her limited-edition resin and vinyl Baby (2020) figures, which reimagine Mickey Mouse as a man dressed in a bright red jumpsuit and feature a geometric silhouette reminiscent of Cubism. 

Abney has recently taken on several commercial ventures. In 2021, she was commissioned by the rapper Meek Mill to design the cover art for his album Expensive Pain. In 2022, she collaborated with Nike to design the Air Jordan 2 Low sneaker. Abney also created a series of UNO playing cards for Mattel featuring her artwork as part of Pharrell Williams’s Black Ambition non-profit initiative.

Abney’s works are in collections around the world, including the Bronx Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Rubell Family Collection and the Burger Collection in Hong Kong.

On 1stDibs, find a range of Nina Chanel Abney’s sculptures, prints and more art.