EXHIBITION SPONSOR - VIRGINIA MOCA

NINA CHANEL ABNEY: THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
APRIL 18, 2026-AUGUST 16, 2026

Virginia MOCA opens its new home with a landmark solo exhibition by Nina Chanel Abney, one of the most incisive voices in contemporary art. The Pursuit of Happiness brings together monumental paintings, collages, sculpture, and an immersive installation that confront how we imagine joy, struggle, and survival in a time of global uncertainty.

Abney’s visual language, built from flat planes of color, graphic silhouettes, and layered symbols, transforms today’s cultural flashpoints into images that are both seductive and unsettling. She draws from pop culture, the news, and the relentless churn of digital life to examine how race, power, and identity shape our daily existence. Her works dazzle with immediacy while insisting on deeper reflection.

The Pursuit of Happiness is not a promise of resolution but a navigation of tension. In an era marked by collective fatigue and unrest, Abney asks audiences to decode her crowded surfaces, confront contradictions, and consider how joy and justice coexist or collide in the present moment. With wit, urgency, and uncompromising clarity, she transforms Virginia MOCA into a space where looking becomes a form of reckoning.

Nina Chanel Abney has held major solo exhibitions at the ICA Boston, ICA Miami, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and The School | Jack Shainman Gallery, among others. Recent commissions include transforming Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall façade in New York and creating a public mural at Miami World Center. Her work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and numerous other institutions.

ARTIST APARTMENT PROGRAM

Rutter Family Art Foundation partners with numerous visual and performing arts organizations across southeastern Virginia. Many of these collaborations are anchored in the Rutter Family Art Foundation Artist Apartment Program. The Foundation offers free short term furnished apartments in our iconic foundation building referred to as the “Texaco Building” which is located on the central corner of the NEON Arts District in Norfolk, Virginia.  Any nonprofit or organization in southeastern Virginia may request apartments for a few nights or a few weeks for visiting artists, lecturers, musicians, conductors, actors, or for other special needs for their organizations.  For the last decade, the Rutter Family Art Foundation has been supplying these apartments and often an honorarium or an event to celebrate the visitor.  These collaborations have often grown into the catalyst for recurring and permanent events.  

If your organization would like to explore this type of collaboration, please contact us!

TRAVEL GRANTS PROGRAM

One of the newer initiatives of The Rutter Family Art Foundation, and one of our favorites, is the travel grant program. We try to identify young professionals, beginning a career museum setting, often in a Curatorial role, who may benefit from a travel grant to see and experience some of the great art venues and exhibitions around the world.  When speaking with these young professionals over the years, we identified a need for developing a fluency — joining a conversation — about other museums, they may not have had the opportunity to visit. With museum budgets, continuing to be constrained, we offer these young individuals a generous travel stipend to engage in any artist experience they feel would excite them. It may be a first trip to the Venice Biennale, or a visit to three museums and exhibitions in Paris. All we ask in return is to be able to take them to dinner afterwards to hear about their experience!

If you know of any young professionals starting a museum career, please contact us and let us know why you think they may be a fit for this grant. We like to keep these awards secret until we tell the person because the element of surprise seems to add a little joy.

MURAL PROGRAM

The Rutter Family Art Foundation most recently collaborated with artist Mickael Broth to create a mural in the Neon District of Norfolk. The work, on either side of the bridge over Voss Street, is entitled, “Long Lines of Communication and Recalibration.”