Hi I'm Nina Chanel Abney and I'm an artist I'm from Matteson, Illinois and now I work and live in Jersey City I never sketch so I had no idea what it was gonna look like so i started i order the spray paint and just kind of get a bunch of different colors that I think I might use I decided for them to paint the background black before I got there and then I just started taping off different shapes and that's how I start I might reference some other murals I've done but overall I don't know what it's gonna look like. It's really intuitive at this point it's just the feeling of what colors feel right next to each other Improvisation is a big part of my process because I don't plan anything out and I'm usually responding to something as I put it on canvas Important for me to give people options like I don't want to be boxed in so I don't want the figures to be boxed in you know I want to be able to raise a bunch of different questions and possibilities and I don't want one just one set answer for the work I'm doing yeah I feel like I've been working that way since I guess the beginning when I pretty much when I switched the races of my classmates so it has just been an overall progression of mixing gender and race and the figures and then I kind of found when i was doing portraits of just because the figure might be black or white the paintings are the automatic read in a very specific way so if i mix and match the races no one could necessarily attach one specific whatever meaning for that painting our something on to that particular figure. the symbols came out of like interest in emojis in a way to abbreviate other things I was talking in the work so before I had like some positive feedback about my work I could simplify something just by shape even if it was a nose that didn't have to be like a well-rendered nose but everyone gets that the nose so from there I wanted to kind of create symbols that could mean multiple things but everyone could have put a definition to it and be something simple so that's where the stencil kind of come from -- so a heart but then I'm i like that i could use it in different ways or depending on where I place it it creates a whole different context and then for the spray-paint colors, yeah, I usually like I need these three different shades of brown and I don't know a lot of different skin tones when I'm doing the figures. I have a lot of texting going on with my friends *laughs* the nail polish emoji in the poop ice cream emoji those are my favorites I mean early on I I wanted to find a way to still keep a sense of humor in the work because I knew you know some of the topics i would touch and so it was important for me to still keep my sense of humor...lightheartedness even if it was kind of deceptive. I always knew I wanted to be an artist but I've never i never knew what that actually looks like and really never could have imagined this so even i guess when I see my work in a museum like and "Oh it's just one of my paintings" but I really don't necessarily see with what someone else would you just walked into the museum would see it's interesting for me to look at it try to put myself in that place again when I was making it and the revelation I had is I feel like I couldn't return to that way of working. I feel like I've gone intuitively and just like the natural progression of my hand and what I gravitate towards overtime and they're things in some of the earlier works that I would want to maybe incorporate now but I don't know if I can even paint like that. I'm curious who I guess there were with everyone's response will be I hope its anger I hope its a mix of reactions like I'm I'm more concerned -- or not concerned -- but I really want my work to be able to still be relevant to what's happening now despite the time when i made it could could have been responding to something completely different but that's what I want for my work to always kind of remain relevant no matter what's happening i'm hoping it could be read in an entirely new way I feel like anyone could be an artist I mean they could still go home and create or find an outlet to express themselves so i would just say just do it. Captions automatically generated by YouTube and cleaned up by J Caldwell.