Extraction, consumer culture, militarization, and environmental decline are revealed as parts of the same interlocking system — one long accepted as normal. Across paintings, sculpture, works on paper, an experimental installation, and the site-specific mural Between Us on view in the Smart’s lobby, Abney examines how these conditions came to feel that way. Flags, mascots, cartoon fires, commercial come-ons, and patriotic iconography are reassembled until their reassurances curdle. Mass culture softens violence just enough to make it familiar; nostalgia, entertainment, and civic ritual do the quiet work — not describing the world so much as making its damage easier to tolerate.
In her work, Abney does not ask how we might save the planet. She asks something harder and quieter: what happens when crisis stops feeling like an emergency and becomes the weather we move through? Who is expected to absorb it, and how long can a strained system keep running on denial, adaptation, and unequal sacrifice? While Supplies Last offers no solution, but helps create a space to consider what it costs to keep standing, and what we might still owe one another while the supply holds.
The exhibition is accompanied by a site-specific installation, Between Us, as part of the Museum’s Threshold Lobby Series, which is on view September 22, 2026, through July 11, 2027.
HOMEPAGE & ABOVE IMAGE: Nina Chanel Abney, Black People (BP), 2022, Triptyph collage on panel, Paper size: 72 × 84″, each panel, Framed dimensions: 73 1/4 × 85 1/4 × 1 3/8″, each. © Nina Chanel Abney. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Prints.
