Nina Chanel Abney Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1982 -

Nina Chanel Abney (born 1982) is an American artist. She was born in Harvey, Illinois. She is an African American contemporary artist and painter who explores race, gender, pop culture, and politics in her work. She attended Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois and received a BFA with a dual major in studio art and computer science. Abney then received an MFA at the Parsons School of Design. 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.” She is best known for her colorful graphic large-scale paintings, four of which are included in the 30 Americans exhibition organized by the Rubell Family Collection of "works by many of the most important African-American artists of the last three decades", which has toured museums and galleries in America since 2008. Her work has also appeared the Whitney Museum, the Jack Shainman Gallery, as well as the Kravets Wehby Gallery[6] in Chelsea. Her first solo exhibition in a museum, Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in February 2017. Curated by Marshall N. Price, the exhibition features about 30 of the artist's paintings, watercolors, and collages and spans 10 years of her work.