Nina Chanel Abney: Big Butch Energy/Synergy

Committed to sharing social realities through fantastic, expansive forms, Nina Chanel
Abney is an artist possessed of an iconic style and wit. Through stylized, cubistic, and
highly charged painterly symbols, Nina Chanel Abney references radical traditions of
graphic design and street art to communicate urgent political and cultural realities with
immediacy to the largest possible audience. Abney’s paintings and collages use
dynamic color and form to draw viewers into complex narratives.
Big Butch Energy/Synergy features Nina Chanel Abney’s recent exhibitions at ICA
Miami and moCa Cleveland. In these works, Abney mines cinematic and media
representations of Greek student life to explore how gender perception and
performance is inspired by the legacies of social ritual and visual culture. The complex
compositions reference scenes from popular slapstick comedy films like National
Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and Porky’s (1981), while citing traditions of baroque
portraiture and fraternity composites. Inspired by her experience as a masculine-of-
center woman, with this body of work Abney asks how viewers gender a figure in a work
of art.