General Conditions @ Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY

GENERAL CONDITIONS

Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY

Through November 29, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery presents GENERAL CONDITIONS at The School at Kinderhook, NY. Bringing together work by over two dozen artists working across a wide range of media and at scales both intimate and grand, the exhibition offers a sustained reflection on the social and political climate of our time by considering how we respond—individually and collectively—when many of the most basic components of public life can no longer be taken for granted.

Featured artists include: El Anatsui, Emanoel Araújo, Shimon Attie, Shannon Bool, Diedrick Brackens, Yoan Capote, Geoffrey Chadsey, Ifeyinwa Joy Chiamonwu, Gehard Demetz, Pierre Dorion, Donyel Ivy-Royal, Hayv Kahraman, Jesse Krimes, Deborah Luster, Richard Mosse, Adi Nes, Jackie Nickerson, Gordon Parks, Mary Ann Peters, Kenny Rivero, Rose B. Simpson, Paul Anthony Smith, Becky Suss, Alina Tenser, Carlos Vega, Charisse Pearlina Weston, Deb Willis, Jaclyn Wright, and Elizabeth Zvonar.

As artist Alina Tenser notes, the idea of ‘general conditions’ “resonates on multiple registers, all sinister but vague. In the world of construction, the term holds power precisely because of its evasiveness, allowing those in control to shift goalposts in ways that serve their interests. Its ambiguity makes it nearly impossible for the opposing or disadvantaged side to challenge, negotiate or fully grasp the terms at play. This dynamic eerily mirrors the structural changes we’re witnessing in federal policy, where language and bureaucracy are weaponized to obscure, justify and enable horrific systemic shifts. In both cases, the lack of clear definition breeds a sense of injustice and impending doom, leaving those affected with no firm ground on which to push back.” With social stability seeming to be an ideal of the past and civic norms disappearing by the day, the artists in this exhibition provide us with a bevy of new strategies for thinking about and confronting the crisis of ‘general conditions’ felt by us all.

While each of the works in GENERAL CONDITIONS stands as vivid expressions and bold aesthetic statements in their own regard, many cohere around recurring themes. For example, Richard Mosse’s Heat Map photographs examine the control and exploitation of refugees and migrants as they attempt to move safely across borders. Using a military-grade telephoto camera that can detect thermal radiation, including body heat, across great distances, Richard Mosse documented refugee camps and staging sites, seeing them as landscapes of human displacement where millions struggle for survival.

Displacement is a theme that Hayv Kahraman also considers in her multimedia works on paper, linen and flax fiber. Her pieces regularly show fragmented or disembodied pairs of eyes set within spacious compositions or, in others, hanging from the branches of trees that remain defiant within their fragile landscapes. For Hayv Kahraman, the disembodiment that her works figurally express serves as a metaphor for the psyche of refugees forced to flee their homes. Kahraman understands this experience personally, having first fled her native country of Iraq and again, more recently, as a result of having to evacuate her home and studio due to the recent wildfires in Los Angeles.

With Utah’s West Desert as both setting and subject, Jaclyn Wright combines original and archival photographs with regional maps and elements of performance to show the impact of late capitalism and settler colonization on the landscapes of the Western United States. Her photographs are composites of historical and contemporary imagery that investigate the codification of the natural world by state officials and business interests alike. Working with mediums and techniques such as, tapestry, embroidery and photograms, Shannon Bool regularly explores how hierarchy is embedded into historical narratives and their visual expressions. In his large-scale and often allegorical paintings that look to the histories of religion and the cosmos alike, Carlos Vega likewise explores the hidden structures of social life and the meanings embedded within them.

Many of the works in GENERAL CONDITIONS express moments of personal defiance and solidarity against the systems of oppression that, by keeping people in positions of uncertainty and even desperation, try to maintain a status quo of injustice and inequity. Gordon Parks’ photographs of Black communities in a still-segregated South show individuals navigating politically fraught circumstances with resolution and grace. The multi-directional colored wooden planes that Emanoel Araújo arranges in his sculpture compositions take a rigid and geometric frame as their background before transcending it through their formal expressivity. Working at a comparatively monumental scale, Rose B. Simpson’s ceramic and mixed-media sculptures of worldly yet ethereal figures, just recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, are specific expressions of the artist’s ancestry and cultural heritage that also uphold the value of the human spirit.

What the variety and complexity of the works in GENERAL CONDITIONS demonstrates is that no single approach for understanding the present historical conjuncture will do. Instead, these artists provide multiple strategies that we can use to better interpret, represent and hopefully seize control of the conditions around us.

THE SCHOOL / JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY

jackshainman.com

GENERAL CONDITIONS

Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY, May 17 - November 29, 2025

Nina Chanel Abney @ Jack Shainman Gallery, New York - At The School - "Lie Doggo" Exhibition

Nina Chanel Abney: LIE DOGGO

The School | Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

May 18 - November 16, 2024

Jack Shainman Gallery presents LIE DOGGO, a monumental exhibition of work by Nina Chanel Abney that spans her creative practice, uniting a new series of paintings with collages, site-specific murals, an immersive digital art installation, and the debut of a new body of large scale sculpture. Paying homage to the sophisticated color theories of Matisse, continuing the legacy of cubists, Picasso and Léger, and connecting with the synesthetic sensibilities of Harlem Renaissance greats, Douglas and Lawrence, Abney brings these historical movements into contemporary pertinence. Abney’s groundbreaking influence has been the center of scholarly praise by art historian Richard J Powell. In a recent lecture, Blackbeats: Cubism Reimagined at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he noted her creative ingenuity: 

Abney’s dramatic patterns, geometric configurations, serrated fragments, and compositional convergences and disassemblings reimagine an art object’s geodesic position both to the viewer and within the canon. She proposes a reimagined Cubism where color, form, and rhythm function counterintuitively as a presence, an accentuation, and evidence of the painting’s internal pulse.

The exhibition’s title, LIE DOGGO, a phrase meaning to remain inconspicuously in wait, suggests a strategic invisibility and biding one’s time, reflecting on when to observe from the shadows and when best to act. In this body of work, Nina Chanel Abney challenges the viewer to explore the vast expanse that lies between what is said and what remains silent, eliciting self-assessment and a call to action. Abney’s visually layered and complex works explore the nuanced interplay between the explicit and the inferred, probing the tacit forces that shape global dynamics, such the impacts of global imperialism, narratives of settler-colonialism, implicit biases, and systemic inequalities. Powell sees this as, “the subtext of institutional / personal regimes of confinement [that] assume a great scrutiny in Abney’s works, especially through the painterly apparatuses of acrylic pigments and arresting colors. Abney rethinks pictorialism, weighing the value of universal signs and imaging systems and probing art’s contested identities, resulting in an artistic catalyst that usurps expectations of a caucasian benchmark.” Scrutinizing the ways in which identities and experiences are shaped by the subtleties of social cues, historical contexts, and the unspoken rules governing racial discourse, Abney highlights the intersectionality of global crises, the various forms of resilience against them, and subsequent suppression of these movements.

The lengthy walls of Nina Chanel Abney’s robust immersive mural lays the energetic groundwork for the exhibition, leading to a new series of painted aluminum sculptures that expand the artist’s visual language with cultural signals and gestures used to communicate identity and solidarity. We turn a corner to be confronted with an American flag-patterned durag; on a serving platter we see missiles that morph into a voluptuous female form; patterns of repetition invoke the commodification of identities, bodies, and violence, and in turn, the reduction of individuals to stereotypes. Through the use of repetition, Abney questions how unspoken rules and agreements influence social cohesion and control. Building on the idea of lying in wait, these works also examine resilience and strategic resistance within communities that are often marginalized or silenced. What are the subtle, everyday acts of defiance and less visible forms of protest and solidarity that are crucial to survival and change? With these works, Abney provokes the viewer to decode messages and confront their own personal interpretations.

Depicting spaces of passage and commune, the acrylic on canvas paintings highlight how locations emblematic of everyday life are imbued with complex, often unarticulated social interactions. Abney re-examines the familiar and considers the social contracts, power relations, and human emotions that animate these spaces. She is interested in the often gridded architecture behind these environments and how a collective whole of individuals is meant to be confined within a specific space. Powell continues, “Abney’s works jolt viewers’ internal sense of equilibrium towards agitation, excitement, and ultimately an inner jouissance - a suspended disbelief in equanimity.” The concept of environment as grid carries over to the printed collages on panel. These settings serve as a backdrop for exploring the world systems put in place to maintain order, while delving into the nuances of public and private life, the dynamics of power and surveillance, and the subtleties of human interaction and behavior.

Concluding the exhibition is an interactive digital art installation, the culmination of Nina Chanel Abney’s Artist-in-Residence with CryptoPunks, which signals the artists appellation of futurity. Her digital worldview reflects on virtual versus real world identities via the iconic digital collection - positing that perhaps the Western world’s so-called conflict resolution lies in an escapism of the difficult horrors of reality. In direct confrontation of the pricing differences evident between CryptoPunks’ digital avatars based on gender and skin tone (in which white, male avatars tend to generate a higher retail than their darker skinned or female counterparts), Abney has created hybridized figures that fuse racial components and blur the lines between masculine and feminine. Through these amalgamations of external signifiers, Abney challenges the notion of an inherent societal “value.” While enabling visitors to create their own virtual avatars, Abney shines a lens on a tendency to stay hidden, to remain silent, and to avoid confrontation and uncomfortable truths. This extends Abney’s commentary on the connections between surveillance culture, deliberate concealment, and the opaque self-fashioning prevalent in digital spaces and in-person interactions. Navigating the tension between speaking out and strategic silence in an era marked by online portrayals, cancel culture, and the contentious debate over free speech, Abney probes the boundaries of prevailing narratives and a fear of being ostracized, questioning the impact of these pressures on creativity and free thought.

LIE DOGGO underscores the role of art as both a veil and a window, camouflaging certain truths while revealing others. Navigating the liminal spaces between invisibility and visibility, expression and restraint, Abney engages viewers in a dialogue that extends beyond what’s immediately apparent by creating a visual space where the aesthetics of stealth, the strategies of survival, and the politics of conspicuousness converge. Through this lens, the exhibition invites viewers to ponder the unseen forces and unarticulated agreements that influence everyday life and societal structures, highlighting how much of our world is shaped by what remains unsaid or deliberately obscured. Strength, resilience, and deep rootedness echo throughout the exhibition. Abney's robust assortment of works stokes us to endure, despite systemic adversities, and to bear witness to history, standing firm against forces that seek to topple narratives of resistance.

Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982, Harvey, IL) has been honored with solo exhibitions at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2023); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2023); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2022); the Gordon Parks Foundation, Pleasantville, New York (2022; traveled to Henry Art Gallery, Seattle); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2019–21); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); and the Contemporary Dayton, Ohio (2021). Additionally, her solo exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2017), toured to the Chicago Cultural Center; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. Abney was recently commissioned to transform Lincoln Center’s new David Geffen Hall façade in New York, drawing from the cultural heritage of the neighborhood previously known as San Juan hill that comprised African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Puerto Rican families. Abney's recent public mural at the Miami World Center was similarly inspired by Overtown, a historic Black neighborhood in Miami. Nina Chanel 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; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; amongst others.

JACK SHAIMAN GALLERY

The 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY 12106

jackshainman.com