About
Abbi Kenny (b. 1998 in Boston, MA) is an artist based in Kingston, NY. She received her MFA in Painting from Boston University College of Fine Arts (2024) and her BFA with honors in Painting and a minor in the Theory and History of Art and Design from the Rhode Island School of Design (2020). She is a Lecturer of Painting and Drawing at Purchase College, SUNY. In recent years, Abbi has lived in Brooklyn, Boston, Toronto, and Providence. While at RISD, Abbi participated in the European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. She is a recipient of the Royal Drawing School Dumfries House Estate drawing residency and grant near Cumnock, Scotland (2019), the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in Painting (2022), a residency and Cottage Award at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild Artist Residency (2024), and, most recently, a residency at the Vermont Studio Center (2026). Her work has been published in New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, and the Observer. She had her debut solo show, The Tasting Room, at Main Projects in Richmond, VA (2026), and her work has been exhibited at September Gallery in Kinderhook, NY; Field Projects in New York, NY; Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York, NY; and the RISD Museum in Providence, RI, among others.
Contact
abbihkenny@gmail.com
News
My show The Tasting Room opens June 4 at Main Projects, Richmond, VA. The exhibition will be on view on June 4 - July 9.
The Tasting Room brings together new paintings by Abbi Kenny in which shellfish, martini olives, fruit, serving platters, and ornamental excess accumulate into layered compositions shaped by touch, preparation, and display. Drawing from meals she cooks, seafood markets, family recipes, historical cookbooks, and personal archives, Kenny constructs paintings that feel simultaneously seductive, humorous, and slightly uncanny. Working with raw pigment, pumice, glitter, mica, glass beads, and semi-precious stones, she builds densely layered surfaces through sanding, masking, pouring, and abrasion, causing illusionistic imagery to fracture into accumulations of texture and material residue. Decorative borders, checkerboards, marbled surfaces, and saturated patterns compete with carefully rendered objects, allowing the paintings to shift between still life, collage, advertisement, and staged display. Throughout the exhibition, food hovers between appetite, ornament, ritual, and performance as meaning emerges slowly through repetition, juxtaposition, and material transformation.
Twenty By Sixteen with over 60 artists opens on June 11th at Morgan Lehman Gallery! Come see a massively diverse selection of paired paintings, installed vertically.
HERE WHERE THE BODY KNOWS IT CAN HURT opening July 10th on view through August 2, 2026. Curated by Gregory Donell Parker at Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA.
Reach Christa Terry’s fantastic interview discussing my painting and my practice.