The Pursuit of Happiness: Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art

Virginia MOCA opens its new home with a landmark solo exhibition by Nina Chanel Abney, one of the most incisive voices in contemporary art. The Pursuit of Happiness brings together monumental paintings, collages, sculpture, and an immersive installation that confront how we imagine joy, struggle, and survival in a time of global uncertainty.

Abney’s visual language, built from flat planes of color, graphic silhouettes, and layered symbols, transforms today’s cultural flashpoints into images that are both seductive and unsettling. She draws from pop culture, the news, and the relentless churn of digital life to examine how race, power, and identity shape our daily existence. Her works dazzle with immediacy while insisting on deeper reflection.

The Pursuit of Happiness is not a promise of resolution but a navigation of tension. In an era marked by collective fatigue and unrest, Abney asks audiences to decode her crowded surfaces, confront contradictions, and consider how joy and justice coexist or collide in the present moment. With wit, urgency, and uncompromising clarity, she transforms Virginia MOCA into a space where looking becomes a form of reckoning.

Nina Chanel Abney has held major solo exhibitions at the ICA Boston, ICA Miami, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and The School | Jack Shainman Gallery, among others. Recent commissions include transforming Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall façade in New York and creating a public mural at Miami World Center. Her work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and numerous other institutions.