How Nina Chanel Abney Contextualizes Blackness and Identity in Lie Doggo
The exhibition is on view until October 5 at Jack Shainman Gallery: The School in Kinderhook, New York.
Soup Kitchen 1 to Soup Kitchen 32. Photo by Dan Bradica Studio.
About three hours north of New York City, art enthusiasts and industry creatives gathered to celebrate Nina Chanel Abney’s solo exhibition, Lie Doggo, at Jack Shainman Gallery: The School in Kinderhook, New York. What I encountered was a testament to Abney's mastery and intellectual prowess in contextualizing Blackness and identity through myriad art forms, including paintings, collages, site-specific murals, digital installations, and large-scale sculptures.
What once was a federal building turned cultural center, The School seemed to be a kindred place to display Abney’s works. As you turn every corner and walk into every room, Lie Doggo encapsulates the walls with the juxtaposition of silence and speaking up. The term “Lie Doggo” refers to inconspicuously waiting, biding time, and reflection.
The multi-floor exhibition translated issues of global imperialism, systemic racism, settler-colonialism, and implicit biases in ways that verbal radicalism and activism cannot relay. Unironically, The School is centered in a Dutch colonial town, which spoke volumes to Black viewers. Abney continued her avatar motif in part with her homage to Henri Matisse’s color theories, Pablo Picasso’s and Fernand Léger’s cubism, and Aaron Douglas’ and Jacob Lawrence’s Harlem Renaissance works.
Abney's art challenges white viewers to confront the uncomfortable truths of their ancestral and present-day actions. Lie Doggo is a testament to the power of gestures, visual language, and cultural signals and how these can be subtly adjusted to make a significant difference depending on one's identity. In the Black community, these concepts have been crucial for communicating our identities and solidarity to strive for freedom and liberation.
Abney acknowledges the issues of reducing people to stereotypes and how this leads to the continuation of commodification. But these commodifications aren’t for nothing; they’re used as shields of defiance, protest, and the refusal to be silenced.
Abney achieves this with pieces such as Pig Out 4 and TOK, a Black avatar holding white ‘missiles’ that resemble breasts, and a Black avatar wearing an American flag durag next to another avatar that seems to have its nipples censored out with Xs. While many of the works in Lie Doggo have objective meanings, Abney leaves many pieces up to the viewer’s interpretation and perspective. As we strolled through The School, it was evident that many Black viewers felt a deep emotional connection, with a clear understanding of what each piece represented compared to some white viewers.
Lie Doggo emphasizes how social contracts, emotions, and feelings often go unspoken throughout acrylic paintings, printed collages, and sculptures. As history has shown, many individuals and communities function best when bound together in a space. However, specific communities, especially Black people, have remained surveilled publicly and privately. The backdrop for these works, like Marabou, Black People (BP), and Soup Kitchen, represents how these powers subtly — and not so subtly — can subconsciously impact human behavior.
For her interactive digital installation, Abney worked with her Artist-in-Residence, CryptoPunks. Real life and the digital world clash through their signature digital avatars. However, these avatars symbolize a facade that Western society often puts up as a form of escapism rather than solving problems and conflicts. Despite collaborating closely with CryptoPunks, Abney confronted a harsh reality: white male avatars often generate a higher retail value than dark-skinned or female avatars.
While viewers can create their own avatars with different skin tones, clothes, and features in the exhibition, Abney masks racial and gender elements, raising the question of what true societal value means. In a world where we know far too much about one another, Abney explores the idea of remaining silent and hidden out of the fear of being ostracized, canceled, surveilled, or punished for free speech.
Whether it’s social media, politics, systemic racism, or global imperialism, Lie Doggo sparks conversations around the antitheses: Invisible versus visible, silent versus loud, conspicuous versus inconspicuous, and conformity versus non-conformity to demonstrate resistance, expression, and confines. This societal relevance of Abney's art invites the audience to actively participate in these discussions regardless of the discomfort and censorship.
Lie Doggo is on view at Jack Shainman Gallery: The School from May 18 to October 5 at 25 Broad St., Kinderhook, NY.
