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News + Read more at W Magazine Tuesday, November 29, 2022 by Kat Herriman Photographs by Jesper D. Lund The artist’s college years are the focus of a new exhibition at the ICA Miami. The New York-based artist Nina Chanel Abney punches eyes out one at a time. Her life-size paper dolls don’t seem to mind. They crowd around the ankles of her standing desk, in blank anticipation, patiently waiting for her to finish their faces so they can go on to their destiny as protagonists in her primary-colored collages. Abney points down at the huddle encircling her feet. “It’s a dance scene,” she says. Assembling her dancers requires meticulous choreography. “One millimeter can shift an expression,” Abney says. Despite the precarity, Abney feels at home in this cut-and-paste world. Over the past decade, her figurative collages depicting the lives and stories of Americans like herself—Black, queer, working class individuals—have become a fixture of the art world. Her exuberantly colored paintings, executed with stencils and spray paint, mimic Abney’s collage aesthetic and make me think of artists like Henri Matisse, Kara Walker, and Lari Pittman—but Abney bats away these art-historical touchstones. She says her mother, who is also an artist, is the one responsible for her love of drawing and collaging. “I’ve been cutting and pasting since childhood,” Abney says. “I like the familiarity of it.” Raised in Chicago by her mother, Abney used drawing as a way to connect. In school, she and her sister invited their mostly white classmates to commission portraits of Black celebrities from them. Abney earned a BFA from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois before heading to Parsons, where she graduated with a masters degree in 2007. In 2008, she participated in the groundbreaking group show 30 Americans at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, and as the exhibition traveled around the country her exuberant images depicting Black joy and pain began appearing in museums alongside fellow participants like Rashid Johnson, Renée Green, and Kerry James Marshall. In 2017, she had an exhibition with Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, and after that she was featured in monographic museum shows. Abney vibrates on a cultural frequency all her own and has also collaborated to create Air Jordan sneakers, as well as a version of the classic game card Uno. Her most visible pop cultural moment, an album cover created last year for Meek Mill’s Expensive Pain , was a tearful cartoon portrait of the rapper surrounded by nude women, a yacht, a motorcycle, and dollar signs. The ICA Miami exhibition of Nina Chanel Abney: Big Butch Energy, on view during Art Basel, focuses on Abney’s college years, when the artist was less assured in her queer identity and struggled to find a community that reflected the kind of person she wanted to be. An epic shower scene, notably, dwells on the awkwardness and discomfort of forced group dynamics. Abney was attracted to the universality of coming-of-age scenes; she is devoted to mediums freighted with childhood resonance and stories she knows can be found on the tip of the tongue. The conceptual second half of the Miami presentation opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland on January 27. Those works focus instead on the more positive side of Abney’s collegiate experience, and the energy is festive. “Like coming into myself and the celebration,” Abney says. The keystone work here depicts a raucous dance party like the ones Abney would have liked to attend. After the MoCA Cleveland show and a well-deserved break, Abney will be doubling down on her efforts to focus on public art and shift her language into three-dimensional sculptures. She’s not sure what they will look like yet, but she does know she wants those artworks to depict the lives of those unsung in the Western canon and be accessible to the public at all hours. “I always want the viewer to be able to feel like they have a connection with the work and recall some of their own similar experiences,” she says. “I’m good at finding communities that wants their stories told. I don’t feel like there is enough representation of Black masculine-presenting or queer women in media, so if I can bring my experience to life and it inspires others then I feel like I’m doing a good job. In earlier work, I was trying to make the content more ambiguous—now, it’s leaning toward the opposite.” Previous Next

Studio Access w/ Manabu Ikeda May 12, 2024 Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. About Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season.

Studio Access w/ Manabu Ikeda Mar 30, 2024 Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. About Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season.

Studio Access w/ Manabu Ikeda May 19, 2024 Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. About Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season.

Studio Access w/ Manabu Ikeda May 26, 2024 Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. About Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season.

Title Round Derek Hess Fishbone , 1994 Serigraph, ed. 100/200 Framed: 27 x 16 inches Estimated Value Range: $400 - $800 Starting Bid: $200 Bidding increments: $50 More: Derek Hess Born in Cleveland in 1964, Hess’ ascendance in the arts should probably come as little surprise. His father, Roy Hess, was a noteworthy designer, and chairman of the lauded industrial design department at the Cleveland Institute of Art. From a young age, Hess was correctly trained in classical art and design. Hess studied at that school, and at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, but he never landed in his father’s department, trying out illustration and graphic design before settling on a major in printmaking. It was that discipline, combined with his love of music, that led Hess to poster art fame. He had begun booking post-hardcore and underground rock concerts at the Euclid Tavern, a divey blues bar across the street from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and he drew his own fliers to promote his shows.

Feb 18-Jun 5, 2021 Naeem Mohaiemen Monday, Day 3753 Feb 18-Jun 5, 2021 Naeem Mohaiemen, Tripoli Cancelled , 2017 (still). HD Video, Color, Sound, 93 min. Courtesy the artist. Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, installations, and essays, to explore histories of rhizomatic families, malleable borders, and socialist utopias. Mohaiemen’s moCa exhibition is built around his first fiction film Tripoli Cancelled (2017), created after a decade of documentaries on left histories. The script follows the daily rituals of a man stranded in an abandoned and dilipidated airport. The film begins on “Monday, Day 3753,” hinting that the nameless protagonist has been trapped, or exiled, within the airport for over ten years. We watch him pass the time by walking the empty halls, dancing to Boney M’s 1978 version of “Rivers of Babylon,” writing letters to his wife, and reading out loud from Richard Adam’s 1972 children’s fable of rabbits, and their Gods, Watership Down . The 93-minute film unfolds with aching slowness, capturing the physical and emotional experience of a solitary man—a protagonist who exists in perpetual limbo. Tripoli Cancelled was filmed in Ellinikon Airport in Athens, Greece, loosely inspired by Mohaiemen’s father, who was stranded in this same airport for nine days in 1977 after losing his passport. The film transforms and expands a personal story into a larger investigation of exile, and the corrosive loneliness of lives under shattered modernity. Is the abandoned airport the result of disaster, or a space that the protagonist has fabricated in his own mind? Is this a place from our past, or are we encountering a glimpse of J. G. Ballard's drowned world? What is real and what is imagined? Tripoli Cancelled asks nothing of the audience; but the patient viewer may piece together fragments, investigate counter narratives, and consider the uncertainty of what awaits our coming futures.

Studio Access w/ Manabu Ikeda May 11, 2024 Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. About Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season.

News + Read more at Crain's Cleveland Business Monday, November 6, 2023 Immersive Exhibits are Leading a Transformation in Cleveland Museums by Paige Bennett Previous Next

Title Round Harminder Judge Untitled (story vi) , 2024 Plaster, polymer, pigment, scrim, oil 9 x 9 1/2 x 1 3/8 inches Estimated Value Range: $6,000 - $9,000 Starting Bid: $4,000 This intimately-scaled “painting” embodies Harminder Judge’s masterful process, where layers of plaster and pigment are sanded and polished to reveal a surface that shifts and shimmers. Like a fleeting vision, the image comes in and out of focus, suggesting what lies just beyond the visible. A graduate of the Royal Academy, London, Judge’s work has been shown internationally, with his first U.S. solo museum exhibition currently on view at moCa Cleveland. Combining Indian neo-tantric influences with abstract expressionism, he creates artworks with rich metaphysical spirit. Courtesy The Sunday Painter More: Harminder Judge Harminder Judge (b.1982 Rotherham, UK) lives and works in London. He graduated from the Royal Academy Schools, London in 2021. Selected recent solo exhibitions include: Cliff and Cleft, Gathering, Ibiza, Spain, 2024; A Ghost Dance , Matt’s Gallery & The Sunday Painter, London, UK, 2024; Sea and Stone and Rib and Bone , Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, India, 2023; Frieze London with The Sunday Painter, London, UK 2022; Rising Skin from Rock and Chin , The Sunday Painter, London, UK 2022; Ankles Absorbing Ash , Humber Street Gallery, Hull, UK 2022; Mountains and Mercies , galeriepcp, Paris, France 2021. Selected recent group exhibitions include: It Never Entered My Mind , Curated by Michael Sherman, Sean Kelly Gallery, LA, USA 2024; Picnic at Hanging Rock Chapter I , Sargent’s Daughters, LA, USA 2024; Curated By: Glossary , Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, Austria 2023; The Reason for Painting , Mead Gallery, Warwick, UK 2023; Love Letter, Pace Gallery, New York City, USA 2023; And this skin of mine , Guts Gallery, London, UK 2022; New Beginnings , Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong, 2022; The Horror Show! , Somerset House, London, UK 2022; A Grain of Sand , The Sunday Painter, London, UK 2021; Am I Human To You? , Jugendstilsenteret & Kube Museum, Ålesund, Norway 2021; Tomorrow: London , White Cube, London, UK 2020.

Studio Access w/ Manabu Ikeda Feb 16, 2024 Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. Generous support for Manabu Ikeda's artist residency and programming by Flagstar Foundation. RELATED EXHIBITION: Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage About Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. Generous support for Manabu Ikeda's artist residency and programming by Flagstar Foundation. RELATED EXHIBITION: Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. Generous support for Manabu Ikeda's artist residency and programming by Flagstar Foundation. RELATED EXHIBITION: Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage

Studio Access w/ Manabu Ikeda May 10, 2024 Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. About Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season.