November 16, 2024 – August 1, 2025
On view at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

A post-apocalyptic scene that wrestles with the impact of social media and the internet on our culture, Nina Chanel Abney’s epic painting I Dread to Think, presciently tackles the impact of the information overload that we experience in our digitally connected society. Conceived before deep fakes, AI, and fake news memes dominated the news cycle, Abney’s brightly colored, abstract human figures tumble across a phantasmic landscape in which the persistence of racism, the reality of sexual difference, the struggle for reproductive rights, and changing expressions of gender disrupt longstanding narratives of American identity, highlighting the cacophony of the contemporary world.

This sixty-foot-long, six-foot-tall painting took Abney over two years to complete. It debuted on October 18, 2012, at a gallery in Lower Manhattan. Ten days later Hurricane Sandy, the worst storm to hit the east coast of the United States in a generation, devastated the region, causing nearly 300 deaths and billions in property damage. Abney’s work barely escaped the flooding, and her exhibition was forced to close early. The Neumann Family, who have supported Abney’s practice since she was a student, stepped in to purchase the painting. But due to its epic scale, the work was placed in storage. This is the first time it has been publicly exhibited in its entirety in twelve years.

I Dread to Think is presented in conjunction with After Modernism: Selections from the Neumann Family Collection at the Arthur Ross Gallery, located in the historic Frank Furness Fisher Fine Arts Library Building. It is curated by Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Professor Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, with assistance from the students in “The Art of Art Collecting,” a special SNF Paideia Program seminar, co-taught with Peter Decherney, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor in the Humanities. The exhibition features VR experiences of the Neumann Family Collection in New York City produced by the class in collaboration with Agora World, Inc. I Dread to Think is a presentation of the Arthur Ross Gallery, Penn Live Arts, and The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation.