Abney’s gallery signed her after seeing her bold and beautiful work at the Parsons Fine Arts Thesis exhibition. “I knew that I had to do something big,” she says. “A lot of galleries come to the graduate shows, so I felt like it was my big chance.” The result was a provocative and powerful painting of Abney and her classmates. While the rest of the students were dressed in orange prison suits, Abney was decked out as a prison guard. But the most striking thing about the image was its race reversal: Abney painted herself as a blue-eyed blond woman and her white classmates as black. “When people heard I was making a class portrait, they all said they knew where I was going with it,” she says. “So I decided I had to switch it up.”
Although her paintings deal with highly charged issues like race, politics, morality, and sex, Abney remains casual to the point of being mysterious when discussing the work. “A lot of people are grasping for meaning and want to know what every object is about. I like to let people figure it out on their own.”
