At times my goal is to broaden my audience by using iconography or symbols so that anyone can relate to the work. I think about stencils and Warhol, and the way his hand is not present in the work, which at one point might have been controversial. Is that important? Or is the art really about the thoughts behind it? All my stencils I make myself, but I use everyday imagery as inspiration, to make a new kind of gesture loaded with many meanings.

I relate to the way Andy Warhol used pop imagery that aspires to some kind of universality. You see this in “Little Race Riot” from his “Death and Disasters” series, which deals with how ubiquitous media portrayals of violence, over time, make us numb to them. It’s similar to how social media presents images today, over and over, making us indifferent to things that are important. In my pieces centered around police brutality, like “Why” — where I use an “X” to cover text and to make a word appear as two different possibilities — I was thinking about the ambiguity of Andy Warhol. He never wanted to give a specific meaning, so the viewer could participate equally. He was great at making us refocus on important things by blowing them up into symbols, but he didn’t give too much away.

This idea of accessibility led me to do merchandise and murals. It’s challenging myself to go into spaces where there might not be a lot of women of color. It also allowed me to challenge the idea that I couldn’t have a painting that’s in the Whitney collection and then have a pair of sneakers in a store. Can a very expensive painting and my work in an alleyway function in the same way? Warhol showed us it could. Someone who might play on a basketball court painted by me might not go in an art gallery but I want to reach them. This desire comes from my own encounters with art. I never went to a lot of museums growing up, and I was exposed to the gallery scene very late.

“Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush” is at the California African-American Museum in Los Angeles through Jan. 20.