iSmart Museum of ArtHyde Park
Nina Chanel Abney: Between Us
A large-scale site-specific mural for the Smart's Threshold series, using the flat visual language of diagrams and educational charts to map power, labour, housing and inequality as one system.
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At the opening night, Smart director Vanja Malloy told guests to "walk into this space here and look up because it's quite extraordinary." The mural fills the lobby, the Eunice Ratner Reception Gallery, so you meet it before you reach any gallery.
Abney, born in Harvey, Illinois, in 1982, borrows the look of classroom wall charts, diagrams and educational puzzles. Here they lay out degradation, extraction, labor, housing, capital and political power as parts of one system, and the museum says the mural deliberately leaves open who is held up and who is left to fall. It is the latest Threshold commission, a series that has put a large contemporary installation in the lobby every year since 2010.
Entry is free, Tuesday to Sunday 10am to 4:30pm, and the lobby costs you no detour. In March 2027 the mural becomes the entrance to Abney's exhibition While Supplies Last, and both close on 11 July 2027.
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- An Hour Or Less
- Cheap Culture
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Image credits
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- Nina Chanel Abney: Between UsPhoto Claire Dorn, courtesy Smart Museum of Art
- Christmas Around the World and Holidays of LightCourtesy of Griffin Museum of Science and Industry
- Goodnight MoonCourtesy of Griffin Museum of Science and Industry
- Anne Frank The ExhibitionCourtesy of Griffin Museum of Science and Industry
- Smart Museum of ArtMichael Barera, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- The Renaissance SocietyWarren LeMay, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
- The DuSable Black History Museum and Education CenterTonyTheTiger via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Griffin Museum of Science and Industryzooey / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0