January 31 - March 1, 2025
ANTHONY GALLERY
1360 West Lake Street
Chicago, IL
From Anthony Gallery e-blast:
Anthony Gallery is pleased to usher in its 2025 programming with Nina Chanel Abney’s FLAGGED. FLAGGED is a solo exhibition featuring new paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and a digital installation. This multidisciplinary presentation explores themes of patriotism, identity, and representation, using American iconography—such as stars, stripes, and flags—reimagined through humor and irony. Abney critiques the gap between national ideals and lived realities, conveying ambivalence, exhaustion, and resilience through expressive text fragments like "meh," "yum," and "liberty."
The exhibition builds on the legacy of David Hammons and Faith Ringgold, with works like Patchwork, a quilt of gouache flags, addressing labor, survival, and resistance. Sculptural pieces such as Soup Kitchen comment on the commodification of Black identity, while paintings like Let the Dollar Circulate challenge the commodification of liberation. Other works, like Rebound and Queens Court, subvert sports symbolism as a site of cultural identity and power.
Merging abstraction with figuration, Abney questions how cultural symbols shape and constrain meaning. FLAGGED reflects on the weaponization and reclamation of symbols of freedom and resistance, urging viewers to reconsider their roles in these narratives and the cost of participation in the American story.
Anthony Gallery is pleased to usher in its 2025 programming with Nina Chanel Abney’s FLAGGED. FLAGGED is a solo exhibition featuring new paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and a digital installation. This multidisciplinary presentation explores themes of patriotism, identity, and representation, using American iconography—such as stars, stripes, and flags—reimagined through humor and irony. Abney critiques the gap between national ideals and lived realities, conveying ambivalence, exhaustion, and resilience through expressive text fragments like "meh," "yum," and "liberty."
The exhibition builds on the legacy of David Hammons and Faith Ringgold, with works like Patchwork, a quilt of gouache flags, addressing labor, survival, and resistance. Sculptural pieces such as Soup Kitchen comment on the commodification of Black identity, while paintings like Let the Dollar Circulate challenge the commodification of liberation. Other works, like Rebound and Queens Court, subvert sports symbolism as a site of cultural identity and power.
Merging abstraction with figuration, Abney questions how cultural symbols shape and constrain meaning. FLAGGED reflects on the weaponization and reclamation of symbols of freedom and resistance, urging viewers to reconsider their roles in these narratives and the cost of participation in the American story.
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