Femme Games: The Contemporary Dayton, Dayton, Ohio

Nina Chanel Abney is at the forefront of a generation of artists that is unapologetically revitalizing narrative figurative painting, and as a skillful storyteller, she visually articulates the complex social dynamics of contemporary urban life.

Her large-scale, colorful, abstracted figurative paintings, have been compared to masters such as Romare Bearden, Stuart Davis, and Henri Matisse. Her works address a wide range of themes, from race and politics to celebrity, religion, sex, and art history. Her oeuvre includes paintings, public murals, 3D figures and toys, interactive animation, and augmented reality pieces; and her work can be found in public spaces, on basketball courts, in museums, and in private collections worldwide.

Abney’s densely packed paintings can be challenging to decipher. The artist has said that her work is “easy to swallow, hard to digest,” and certainly its playful and seductive nature belies its often-serious tone. She comes from a generation raised on screens, in which multitasking and processing multiple streams of information simultaneously is the norm, and thus loads her works full of visual data. Identified in 2020 by Vanity Fair magazine as one of the many artists championing the Black Lives Matter movement,  and whose work graced the May, 2021 New Yorker, her distinctively bold style harnesses the flux and simultaneity that has come to define life in the 21st century.

Several of the paintings seen here are inspired by Abney’s recent experiences. In May, 2020 in response to the pandemic lockdown, she bought a bike which she loaded onto her car and headed out of her New Jersey apartment and out of the city. That trip led to others and the rural destinations stirred up ideas. Of that time she said she was thinking in part: “Is there space for Black autonomy in a world organized by white supremacy? If it were an actual place—a space absent of race relations, antagonistic or friendly—what would it look like?”

In Femme Games (2020), Abney creates a woodland setting with layered brown fragments that depict tree trunks and branches, blocks of blue with wavelike strokes that evoke water, and striped rectangles that resemble picnic blankets and beach towels. On the same visual plane, a group of lively characters sit around a pregnant figure, their expressively angled limbs and hands suggesting vibrant conversation, their activity fully integrated into their environment.

This series responds to these questions by reimagining Black people’s relationship to nature, property, and each other. Taking inspiration from the fugitive utopias of Black queer social life, these scenes refuse the enclosure of Blackness to topographies of the city and to ideals if heteronormativity. Instead, Abney offers a parallel story of sanctuary and community via abstracted landscapes across which Black people build and enjoy a world of their collective making — figures cycle, pick flowers, bake pies, gather around camp fires, and breast feed babies. . “I was thinking about people leaving the city,” says Abney, “and what it would mean to own a bunch of land and kind of start your own thing.”