Before the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU was even around, and before the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts really began to embrace contemporary work, especially anything connected to street art or artists working in the present, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art was already doing that work. It was one of the few institutions in the state consistently engaging with the kind of ideas showing up outside of traditional museum spaces.
Standing in front of Nina Chanel Abney's Heads of State, you start to understand how her work operates. It pulls you in the way a picture book might but the longer you stand there, the more it starts to shift. Your eye keeps moving, trying to connect things that don’t immediately resolve. Nothing quite settles and the composition keeps you slightly off balance, moving between recognition and confusion. It starts to feel less like a single image and more like a set of ideas happening all at once. Across the exhibition, that same language carries through.