Nina Chanel Abney is at the forefront of a generation of artists that is unapologetically revitalizing narrative figurative painting. As a skillful storyteller, she visually articulates the complex social dynamics of contemporary urban life. Royal Flush—her first solo museum survey—includes paintings, watercolors, and collages created over the past ten years. Abney draws on mainstream news media, animated cartoons, video games, hip-hop culture, celebrity websites, and tabloid magazines to make paintings replete with symbols that appear to have landed on the canvas with the stream-of-consciousness immediacy of text messages, pop-up windows, or the scrolling headlines of an incessant 24-hour news cycle. By engaging loaded topics and controversial issues with irreverence, humor, and lampooning satire, Abney’s works are both pointed contemporary genre scenes as well as scathing commentaries on social attitudes and inequities.

Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush is organized by Marshall N. Price, Nancy Hanks Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In Los Angeles it is presented in two parts, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the California African American Museum. CAAM’s presentation is organized by Naima J. Keith, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, with Simone Krug, Curatorial Assistant.