Opening · 10am–1pm
Nina Chanel Abney: Between Us
Smart Museum of Art|
Commissioned by the Smart Museum of Art for the Threshold series. Nina Chanel Abney takes the most familiar images of American life, drawn from advertising, sports, cartoons, and the news, and turns them against themselves, using humor and accessibility to draw viewers in before the harder questions surface. For the commission at the Smart, Abney created a large-scale mural, entitled Between Us, that borrows the visual language of childhood instruction, such as diagrams, wall charts, educational puzzles. The forms stay recognizable, but their reassurances curdle the longer one looks. What emerges is a landscape of entanglement. Degradation, extraction, labor, housing, capital, and political power are revealed as parts of the same system, one that distributes its benefits and burdens unevenly. Between Us refuses to resolve who is held up and who is left to fall. The title names the space the mural investigates: what exists between us is never empty. It is filled with infrastructures, ecologies, institutions, histories, and obligations that shape how we encounter one another long before we ever meet, and that decide, quietly and in advance, who is supported and who is exposed. Between Us asks the viewer to distrust the ease of the familiar diagram, to notice that its symbols were never as separate or as innocent as they seemed, and to hold that suspicion.
