Nina Chanel Abney - New Now New York Tuesday, March 12, 2024 | Phillips

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  • The fluorescent colors and simplistic style of Nina Chanel Abney’s The Money Tree, 2008, reads like a childhood fairytale at first; however, a closer read into the artist’s use of politically charged symbols and macabre motifs reveals the ways in which the work is ultimately a commentary on race and identity. Central to the painting, a Black woman stands within a dark forest dressed in a blue bonnet and chartreuse gloves; a picnic basket rests beside her, akin to the imagery of the folktale ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ Close looking, however, reveals the horrifying understanding that the figure stands upon dismembered legs with a conjured apparition of a bloodied hanging tree in her outstretched palm. She is being restrained by a pair of colorless arms belonging to a white man whose body blends into the gray shadow of the barren trees in the background with the face of a second white man also peeks out from the darkness.

     

    Romare Bearden, The Conjur Woman, 1964, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Image: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence, Artwork: © 2024 Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

    With splashes of satirical genre from Robert Colescott, bodily abstraction from Pablo Picasso, and colorful collage-like composition from Romare Bearden, The Money Tree is a testament to Abney’s ability to mine art historical precedents to create a striking new visual language. A seminal example of her work, The Money Tree was included in her first survey exhibition, Royal Flush, at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham in 2017. As Marshall N. Price, curator of the exhibition, has aptly noted:

    “Abney’s work arrived at an auspicious cultural moment, filling a need to visually document, assess, critique, and protest the complex dynamics of American culture.” i While certainly provocative, Abney’s paintings are not overbearing in their message. Richard F. Powell, Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, observes that many of Abney’s works “seem less accusatory than objective statements of fact: delineations of conflict, experiential and visceral, in which institutional authority, community unrest, and racial difference serve the cool, disaffected objectives of the abstract.”ii The titling of this work is similarly ambiguous; there is no clear allusion to ‘money’, and the most prominent red ‘tree’ instead seems reminiscent of the lynching trees described in Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, with ‘blood on the leaves and blood at the root’ bearing ‘strange and bitter crop.’ Just as the trees in Holiday’s song bear sinister fruit, Abney’s The Money Tree weaves a similarly unsettling tale.

     

    In 2012, Abney’s work began to shift from “narrative driven” to “mixing disjointed narratives and abstraction”. As she stated in an interview:

    “I don't necessarily aim to send out a particular message, rather I want the work to provoke the viewer to come up with their own message, or answer some of their own questions surrounding the different subjects that I touch on in my work.” iii

    While painted prior to this statement, perhaps The Money Tree is foreshadowing the artist’s ambition to prompt introspection within the viewer, rather than providing explicit answers. Thus, in creating such an unsettling scene, the anxieties of the work seem to take on a life of their own, asking the viewer to consider what message these strange characters and undecipherable symbols are conveying.

     

    A detail of the present work.

    Painted a year prior to The Money Tree is Abney’s masterful Class of 2007, a depiction of her graduating MFA class at Parsons School of Design, where she was the only Black student. In the painting, the artist subverts her reality, envisioning herself as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed prison guard, and rendering her classmates as Black inmates.iv The work, acquired by the Rubell Family Collection, toured from 2008 to 2022 as part of the global traveling exhibition, 30 Americans. Painted only a year later, The Money Tree bears both conceptual and visual similarities – from the racial commentary to the yellow glove motif. As the artist has stated, “Everyone in the painting is kind of a suspect. I use rubber gloves to symbolize that someone has done dirty work.”v

     

    The Money Tree fits seamlessly into Abney’s oeuvre that centers around the artist’s dedication to storytelling. She aims to highlight the reality of our brutal world with foremost attention to detail, no matter how unsettling these images may be.

     

    Mashall N. Price, ed., Royal Flush, exh. cat., Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University et al., 2017, p. 18.

    ii Ibid, p. 13.

    iii Nina Chanel Abney, quoted in "Nina Chanel Abney's Paintings Mix the Pretty, The Political and The Perverse," Huffington Post, February 20, 2012, online.

    iv William Whitney, “Nina Chanel Abney: Safe House / Seized the Imagination,” The Brooklyn Rail, online

    “Young Artists: Nina Chanel Abney,” W Magazine, November 2, 2008, online.

    • Provenance

      Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York
      Private Collection
      Phillips, London, Private Selling Exhibition, November 8–25, 2017, lot 22
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      London, Phillips, American African American, November 8–25, 2017, pl. 22, (illustrated)
      Durham, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Chicago Cultural Center; Los Angeles, California African American Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art; Purchase, Neuberger Museum of Art, Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, February 16, 2017–August 4, 2019, pl. 6, p. 118 (illustrated)

36

The Money Tree

acrylic on canvas
78 1/2 x 56 1/8 in. (199.4 x 142.6 cm)
Painted in 2008.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$120,000 - 180,000 

Sold for $101,600

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now Sale
T +1 212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com
 

New Now

New York Auction 12 March 2024