Nina Chanel Abney Upends College Greek Life Stereotypes at ICA Miami

For her solo exhibition on the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, artist Nina Chanel Abney mines supply materials that Hollywood has liked to painting for the higher a part of half a century in movies like 1978’s Animal House and 2003’s Old School: collegiate Greek life. It is sensible for an artist who typically explores themes of American popular culture and modern society, queer expression, and race to touch upon systemic points that face Black communities.

The works in “Big Butch Energy” discover the realities of intersectional identities — Black, queer, cisgender, trans — inside the very American and heteronormative realm of fraternities and sororities. The scenes that comprise Abney’s collages are stretched throughout panels of two, three, and 5 sections, narrating in meticulous element the inherent complexities in these hedonistic environments. The exhibition, debuting in Miami, is a part of the ICA’s programming for Miami Art Week and is on view via March 12, 2023.

Now 40, Abney got here to the forefront of a technology of rising classically skilled artists within the early 2000s when she graduated from New York University’s Parsons School of Design in 2007. Originally from Chicago, she arrived on the East Coast carrying childhood inspirations of cartoons and comics that leaked into her canvases as her fashion developed. Her grasp’s thesis work, titled Class of 2007, commented on being the one Black scholar in her program. Flipping the racial identities of her white friends to these of Black figures clothed in orange inmate uniforms and her Black self to that of a white, gun-toting corrections officer, the work confronted the viewer with the racial realities of collegiate life with an urgency that persists  a decade and a half later in “Big Butch Energy.”

Her thesis work caught the attention of Miami-based collectors Don and Mera Rubell, who added it to their intensive everlasting assortment and featured Abney because the youngest artist within the Rubell Museum’s 2008 exhibition “30 Americans.” During the following decade, Abney honed her well-conceived figurative storytelling via collage and portray and a definite knack for hand-cut playful visible sequences. In February 2017, her first solo museum exhibition, “Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush,” debuted on the Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina and traveled to different establishments together with the Chicago Cultural Center and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The new work for “Big Butch Energy” references the traditions of baroque portraiture and fraternity composites and scenes from motion pictures like Animal House. Abney’s use of Greek scholar life as a springboard to a dialogue of race, gender, and sexuality is particularly important in gentle of current reviews that undergraduate diploma admissions are down and Greek life recruitment has decreased for the reason that onset of the pandemic. Abney cuts those self same seams of taboo via the simplified symbology in every rendering — the whole lot from the pastel Vineyard Vines-like collegiate clothes the figures put on to the numerous tartan patterns that floor the work within the cultural incubator and aesthetic zeitgeist of faculty life in America within the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

“This is the artist’s first large-scale set up devoted to the notion of gender, and it was impressed each by Nina’s expertise and her remark that feminine figures in her work have been misgendered by audiences,” Alex Gartenfeld, ICA’s inventive director, tells New Times. “The ensuing compositions make a broad vary of art-historical references, from baroque nonetheless life to posters fashionable in school dorm rooms to the works of Barkley Hendrix.

“Nina is an artist who is consistently difficult herself to tackle new matters and methods,” provides Gartenfeld. “With this exhibition, we sought to offer the artist a chance to experiment with a large-scale set up. The outcomes are an astounding and private new chapter in Nina’s exploration of how we gender types. She has additionally continued to experiment with the medium of collage, creating ever-more-complex compositions.”

Gartenfeld’s assertion that this marks a brand new chapter for Abney however, the inspiration for “Big Butch Energy” is rooted within the artist’s reinterpretation of the gender norms she noticed in media.

“About a 12 months in the past, I made a decision to rewatch motion pictures corresponding to Animal House and Porky’s — a sure style of film that in my youthful years had an affect in informing my perceptions of masculinity and femininity. ‘Big Butch Energy’ just isn’t in regards to the realities of Greek life, particularly,” Abney explains. “I used depictions of Greek life and school in movies because the catalyst to discover representations of masculinity and the way these references are in opposition with my very own id as a masculine-presenting lady. This is among the many first exhibitions to foreground the illustration of masculine-of-center Black girls.”

Inviting viewers to “I spy” cut-and-paste panels of discovered supplies riddled with clues and allusions to movies portraying school life at its most raucous and raunchy, Abney recontextualizes a reality of American media that leaks into world perceptions and stereotypes referring to gender efficiency and poisonous expressions of masculinity and femininity. (Not to say the shortage of Black and brown our bodies actively taking part inside these environments.) Yet there’s humor within the works on view, and for the artist, there is a playful recreation that taunts on the fleeting hilarity of those social environments of belonging. With items titled Homiesexuals and The Light Skinned Comeback, Abney subverts the absurdity of the media’s portrayal of Greek life whereas empowering the potential of getting Black and brown folks inhabit the lead roles. From an all-Black solid of cheerleaders proclaiming “Go Femmes” to the messiness of pizza stains on a white shirt surrounded by a tie-dye background, the works concurrently invoke school life and the expertise of being Black and queer in America.

Abney’s skill to assemble a collage of paper in a spread of colours, shapes, and sizes, using mediums like spray paint, is revolutionary in and of itself. What seems to be a conventional portray fully rendered on a single layer is a jigsaw puzzle whereby the artist asserts company in molding and gluing collectively sharp geometric shapes to kind a clean, cohesive composition. “Big Butch Energy” calls out to the viewer with its animated colour schemes and combos, resonating with every particular person’s lived expertise and encounter with the social realities and media illustration of collegiate life.

Says Abney: “I hope the viewers could have an enjoyment and a better appreciation for the printmaking and collaging course of, and maybe will replicate on methods through which they’ve or haven’t been complicit in perpetuating dangerous concepts round id and gender.”

“Nina Chanel Abney: Big Butch Energy.” Monday, November 28, via March 12, 2023, at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, 61 NE forty first St., Miami; 305-901-5272; icamiami.org. Admission is free.