About the Exhibition:
FLAGGED is a multi-layered solo exhibition of new work by Nina Chanel Abney. This multidisciplinary presentation, encompassing paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and a digital installation, interrogates the complexities of patriotism, representation, and identity through the artist’s lens. Nina Chanel Abney reimagines the language of American iconography—stars, stripes, eagles, and flags—layering them with a stream of consciousness of humor and irony to explore the dissonance between national ideals and lived realities. Through expressive text fragments like “meh”, “yum”, and “liberty”, she distills ambivalence, exhaustion, and resilience into a vibrant shorthand that resists singular interpretation and invites viewers to confront their assumptions about identity and power.
Abney examines the shifting and contested meanings of patriotism in contemporary America, expanding on the legacy of David Hammons and Faith Ringgold. Works such as Patchwork, a quilt-like installation of 24 gouache on paper flags, evoke themes of labor, survival, and community, while drawing on histories of coded resistance. Abney’s sculptural work, Soup Kitchen, explores the commodification of Black identity, transforming Warholian pop tropes into a potent commentary on systemic erasure. New paintings, such as Let the Dollar Circulate and Plated and Elated, challenge the commodification of liberation, interrogating whose narratives are elevated or consumed within the American cultural framework; while Rebound and Queens Court subvert the symbolism of sports as a cultural battleground for identity and representation.
Across this body of work, Abney merges abstraction and figuration to question the assumptions embedded in cultural symbols. From the subversion of basketball courts as sites of national pride to the inclusion of ambiguous shapes symbolizing resilience amidst systemic inequity, FLAGGED reflects on the ways we read images, what is legible, and the meaning that is made from common objects and commonplace ideas. The exhibition offers a sharp and urgent meditation on how symbols of freedom, identity, and resistance are shaped, weaponized, and reclaimed, asking viewers to reconsider their roles within these narratives. Abney continues her exploration of the ways in which symbols shape, constrain, and liberate, asking who gets to participate in the American narrative and at what cost.
