Many of the characters played by the actress Tessa Thompson, 42, keep trying to assert their power in hostile environments. For her breakout role in Justin Simien’s 2014 film, “Dear White People,” she appears as Samantha White, a strident student activist calling out racist transgressions and perceived slights on a college campus while attempting to forge solidarity among the university’s Black population. In Boots Riley’s sci-fi comedy “Sorry to Bother You” (2018), she’s an artist confronting a sinister megacorporation. Raised between Los Angeles and Brooklyn, Thompson performed in productions at Santa Monica High School. October saw the release of “Hedda,” in which she plays a 1950s version of Hedda Gabler in a film adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play. Directed by Nia DaCosta and produced in part by Thompson through her company, Viva Maude, “Hedda” is set amid a rambunctious house party at the English countryside estate where Gabler and her husband live. The socialite hurtles toward a meltdown as she manipulates friends, foes and exes in a scheme to maintain her lifestyle.
Thompson says that, because acting feels so connected to her own image, she’s drawn to visual artists for the ways they externalize their imaginations. One artist she’s long admired is Nina Chanel Abney, 43. Born in Harvey, Ill., and trained at Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill., and Parsons School of Design in New York, Abney is known for a whirling, graphic style that reimagines Black portraiture and everyday objects, from a deck of Uno cards to a pair of Jordan 3 sneakers, with bold blocks of color. Her mural “NYC Love” (2022-23), which was installed along the High Line in Manhattan, features imagery associated with the city, including pigeons, pizza slices and the Statue of Liberty, as well as a repetitive dollar-sign motif — an apparent critique of New York’s increasing unaffordability.
Her latest series of paintings concerns the climate crisis and environmental racism and was the subject of a solo exhibition at Perrotin gallery in Paris. A week after the opening in September, Abney flew to New York, where she met with Thompson for the first time. By the end of their 90-minute conversation, which took place at a photography studio near Union Square, they agreed about what it means to make art with a sense of social responsibility and seemed to disagree about what makes a good painting.
T Magazine: Nina, how do you balance commercial work and a fine-art practice? Tessa, how do you balance more commercial films with passion projects?
Nina Chanel Abney: It’s a rotation for me. When I’ve done an exhibition that’s a bit heavier, some of the commercial projects feel more lighthearted, so it allows me a bit of a break. I rotate between products, public mural projects and what I’m doing in a gallery.
Tessa Thompson: In my business, they often refer to it as “one for them, one for you.” Do you think about it that way?
N.C.A.: Yeah, in some cases.
T.T.: I’m so curious. Obviously, there’s this commercial thing, which [requires products to have] market fit — you have a client and there’s oversight. But also, and not to be gauche, when you’re making fine-art work, you want to sell it.
N.C.A.: Of course, that’s my livelihood. But it’s a little different.
T.T.: How different is it, effectively?
N.C.A.: Because I have no control of what’s going to be salable in the art space.
T.T.: You don’t?
N.C.A.: Subject matter [can make a piece] less salable, depending on what I’m addressing in the work.
T.T.: Sure.
N.C.A.: But with a Jordan, [the brand has] statistics on what works overall. And it’s not like I follow that, but there are guidelines. For art, you don’t know what’s going to be a dud and what’s not until it happens. Is it like that [with acting]?
T.T.: Hollywood would have you think that they know. Certainly, at a time when the industry has experienced a lot of contraction, you can look at trends about what can make it to a theater, what kinds of stories are a harder sell. Some of the trends are created by the way we talk about these things. I’m sure that also happens in the art world, to a certain extent, right?
N.C.A.: To a certain extent. I really think the art world is similar to the music industry. I’m thinking of a gallery as a record label that represents different artists. You don’t know who’s going to be Beyoncé and who’s not. You have no way to determine that. I can’t go to a museum curator and say, “Give me a show.” It’s by chance. I don’t know what would make them interested in giving me a solo exhibition that would add to the prestige of my work, so it’s kind of a big mystery. In that way, it doesn’t feel sustainable. You never know when you’ll fall out of popular favor. Five years from now, I could have a whole different kind of career.
T.T.: It’s precarious.
N.C.A.: You have to be a bit delusional to know that, no matter what, it’s going to work out.
T.T.: That’s definitely true. When [aspiring actors] ask for advice, I’ve said, “If there’s anything else you could imagine yourself doing, do that.”
N.C.A.: What’s the secret life you’d wish to live?
T.T.: I don’t have any secret lives that I’d wish to live, except for a life of hobbies and leisure — I imagine that’s what retirement looks like — and, oh, to be a painter, but I can’t paint.
N.C.A.: How do you know you don’t know how to paint? Have you tried to paint?
T.T.: Yeah.
N.C.A.: By what standard are you judging if you can paint or not? Because it’s so subjective. Is there something in particular you want to paint? Are you going off a realistic rendering of something?
T.T.: Why are there certain people who, without any formal training, can sit down and look at your face and make a rendering that’s recognizable?
N.C.A.: But does that make a good painting?
T.T.: I don’t know, but why can some people do that? That kind of innate talent mystifies me because I just don’t possess it, and it’s remarkable to me, people that do. There are intrinsic things that help what I do, for example, like a deep empathy, deep curiosity. Some of those things are innate, but that ability to sit down and look at something in front of you and make a rendering of it to varying degrees of [realism] is incredible to me. Could I learn how to do that through much toiling away? Probably. Would it have a point of view or flair or personality? I don’t know.
N.C.A.: I’m drawn to work where it’s clear to me that the artists have abandoned all that kind of thought, where it’s their natural hand without any interference. So if you just did a portrait and [didn’t think] too much about it, it might make for a great painting, you know?
T.T.: It might. I mean, it’s a very layman way of thinking about it, in the same way that you have people come into an art gallery or a museum and go, “I could have done that.” You’re like, “No, you couldn’t have, because you didn’t. Because you wouldn’t even have thought to. And so can you? Maybe, but you can’t because you couldn’t and you didn’t.” But you’re right. How do I know I can’t paint? I don’t know.
N.C.A.: I have a “Hedda” question because I watched it last night. The film’s 1950s setting, a decade that [Nia] DaCosta calls “the great age of pretending,” mirrors a culture eager to paper over trauma with illusions of stability. Today we’re living through another kind of pretending, where administrations are working to censor, erase and roll back progress outside of cis white patriarchy. Do you think Hedda’s implosion feels uniquely tied to the 1950s, or does her downfall echo the ways people are being suffocated right now to return to this enforced illusion?
T.T.: First of all, that’s beautiful. I think it’s about now. It’s about the ways in which we are hemmed in by the time and place in which we live. That, as you said, can be applied to the ’50s and to the present. The connection between that time and the time we’re living in now is scary and harrowing, frankly. When you engage with work that’s set in the past, the present is always implicated. We sort of let ourselves off the hook by assuming how we might have shown up in that time. And I hope I have an honest conversation with myself about how I’m showing up now to understand how I might have shown up then. I don’t know that we do that enough. We’re living in a time when, every day, we wake up inside of a place that’s been destroyed by the day before. You’re just waking up from a disastrous party the night before. We’re in some kind of cycle. And on the other hand, there’s still so much frivolity. We’re not sitting in the aftermath long enough to clean up and do better.
T Magazine: Nina, you’ve said that the figures and symbols in your paintings allow people to enter them. They’re ambiguous and anonymous enough for people to see themselves in them, yet they also speak to the moment. Your work metabolizes all kinds of issues of the day, but it’s able to live outside of it as well.
N.C.A.: It’s probably because I don’t want to be responsible. I guess I don’t want to put too much personal [information] out there, because that could be distracting.
T.T.: Distracting from the work itself?
N.C.A.: Maybe a distraction for the viewer. It’s pretty obvious, based off my work, where I stand. When I first moved out [to New York] and was going to see shows, I would see how non-Black audiences would look at artwork by Black people, and they would kind of glaze over it because they didn’t feel like it had anything to do with them. So I think about that in my work because the things I’m talking about affect everybody. Tessa, are you finding community in your industry being Black and queer, and how do you imagine a future for Black queer cinema?
T.T.: I don’t know that I’m the best person to answer that question. I’m interested in Viva Maude more broadly being a space where Black queer folks might want to bring their projects because they’ll be protected and also have a pathway to being seen by people and engaged with, not just by the industry but by the general public, which is what these stories deserve. I hope I’m not misquoting you, but I sense from you something that I relate to as well, which is that you’re not interested in being the ambassador for anything. I also don’t think I’m well suited to be one. I’ve never felt a real desire to label myself with regard to my sexuality; the press does that. Which is not to say that we don’t need ambassadorship and folks who are real activists. It’s just that I’ve never classed myself as being any of those things. In fact, it’s one of the questions I had for you because people could say that there’s activism in your work. I’m curious if you see it that way.
N.C.A.: I could paint a Black figure and the work would already be politicized just because the figure’s Black. Or I could not paint any Black figures — no matter what I do, it’s going to be put in that framework, so I just do what I want to do. And sometimes I want [my work to be seen as political]. But sometimes I’m painting about just being a person. I oscillate between considering my responsibility as an artist and being a human who wants to create and share my experiences that might not be specific to being a Black woman.
T.T.: That [idea] was attributed to Nina Simone, like, how could an artist not reflect the times in which they live? For some people, I think that’s a very deliberate act, and for others there’s this feeling that anything you do is going to be politicized anyway. And also, the way that you see the world becomes reflected in the work. You say you oscillate, but I wonder how you deal with a sense of responsibility.
N.C.A.: At this point, I don’t necessarily feel a responsibility to an audience. Especially now, I feel more of a responsibility to myself and how I’m doing my part in this particular moment. I might not be out there with a sign protesting, but some of my work, I think, these days, is me trying to tap in and make a difference.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Photo assistant: Donna Viering. Thompson: Hair: Lacy Redway. Makeup: Keita Moore. Stylist: Karla Welch
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