Nina Chanel Abney (American, b. 1989) is a painter whose bold, color-blocked compositions layer numbers, symbols and mismatched figures into dense visual narratives about race, gender, sexuality, class and history.,Her visual language, drawn partly from memes and emojis, uses humor as what she has called “my weapon and my shield” to draw viewers into work that is easy to swallow but hard to digest.,
Abney's first degree combined studio art and computer science, a foundation she later returned to as she moved into digital art.Her work draws on Henri Matisse's use of color, Pablo Picasso's Cubist deconstruction of the human figure, and Aaron Douglas's lyrical depictions of African American life. Between her 2017 show “Royal Flush” at the Nasher Museum of Art and “Hot to Trot. Not.” at the Palais de Tokyo in 2018, her figures shifted from a rounder, cartoonish style toward the angular, Cubist forms that define her more recent paintings.
Her paintings have entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and she has received commissions from Lincoln Center. She has also extended her visual language into design collaborations with Jordan, Timberland and EA Sports, and designed covers for The New Yorker.
In 2022 she co-founded GODA, a platform intended to bridge fine artists and Web3, and went on to launch her own NFT project, Super Cool World, which Avant Arte later helped collectors turn into authenticated physical prints.,Yuga Labs selected her to make Super Punk World, the first release in its CryptoPunks artist-residency program, Punk in Residence.That residency fed into “LIE DOGGO”, her 2024 show at Jack Shainman Gallery's The School in Kinderhook, New York, which paired new paintings with her first sculptures and an interactive digital installation. The sculptures, made in painted aluminum, were shaped partly by the examples of Marisol and Edmonia Lewis.
In 2025 the Elbow Church in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, presented “Heaven's Hotline”, a show of her monumental sculptures confronting religious capitalism and American Christian ideals.The following year the Andy Warhol Foundation awarded an $80,000 grant to support an Abney exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.
