“As Artistic Director, I wanted to create something that’s both playful and layered. Food is funny that way; it’s full of contradictions. It’s pleasure and excess, comfort and critique all at once. My approach was to have fun with those tensions. Guests can expect a world that’s bright, weird, and communal, a kind of visual buffet that’s as much about the feeling as it is about the feast.” - Nina Chanel Abney

Combining representation and abstraction, Nina Chanel Abney’s practice captures the frenetic pace of contemporary culture. Broaching subjects as diverse as race, celebrity, religion, politics, sex, and art history, her works eschew linear storytelling in lieu of disjointed narratives. Through a bracing use of color and unapologetic scale, Abney’s work proposes a new type of history painting, one grounded in the barrage of everyday events and funneled through the velocity of the internet. Abney’s work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Bronx Museum, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Rubell Family Collection, Florida; the Nasher Museum of Art, North Carolina; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; amongst others.