| Intro | Nigerian born US artist |
| Is | Artist |
| From | Nigeria |
| Type | Arts |
| Gender | female |
Njideka Akunyili Crosby (born 1983 in Enugu, Nigeria) is a Nigerian-born visual artist working in Los Angeles, California. Her works on paper combine collage, drawing, painting, printmaking, and photo transfers. Akunyili Crosby negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria, creating works that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds. She has created a sophisticated visual language that pays homage to the history of Western painting while also referencing African cultural traditions. Akunyili Crosby depicts deeply personal imagery that transcends the specificity of individual experience and engages in a global dialogue about trenchant social and political issues.
A hallmark of her compositions is the use of small photographic images as if they were swatches of fabric. She photocopies pictures from various sources such as wedding albums and magazines and transfers them to paper using acetone solvent. The result is a memory-book textile that evokes the feelings of nostalgia, rootedness, homesickness, and loss, adding the dimension of time to the work and demonstrating the artist’s culture of origin is present in her daily life.
Early life and education
Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1983. She completed her secondary school at Queen’s College (QC) Yaba, Lagos from 1993 to 1999. During her time at QC, she served as a prefect and received a number of academic and leadership awards. She graduated in 1999. At the age of 16 she left home to study in the United States. Her work addresses the move between Enugu, where she grew up, and America, where she now lives. She tries to answer the question of how she can stay connected to the amorphous idea of “home”. Akunyili Crosby creates vibrant paintings that weave together personal and cultural narratives drawn from her experience. She uses an array of materials and techniques in each of her autobiographical works. Collage and photo transfer provide texture and complexity to the surface of each composition in which photographs from family albums mingle with images from popular Nigerian lifestyle magazines. This varied and inventive use of media serves as a visual metaphor for the intersection of cultures as well as the artist’s own hybrid identity.
She earned a BA from Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, and an MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT. She has participated in artist residency programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), the Bronx Museum AIM, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program.
Career
Since 2012, Akunyili Crosby has participated in major group and solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Her 2015 solo shows include The Beautyful Ones, at Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2015) and Hammer Projects: Njideka Akunyili Crosby at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015)
Significant group exhibitions include the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, curated by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin (New York); Portraits and Other Likenesses from SFMOMA, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (2015); Draped Down at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014); Sound Vision at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2014); Meeting in Brooklyn, curated by Monical Lenaers at Landcommandery of Alden Biesen, Bilzen, Belgium (2014); Shaktiat Brand New Gallery, Milan (2014); I Always Face You, Even When it Seems Otherwise at Tiwani Contemporary, London (two-person show with Simone Leigh, 2013); I Still Face You at Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis (solo show, 2013); New Works at Gallery Zidoun, Luxembourg (two-person show with Abigail DeVille, 2013); Jump Cut at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2013); Housewarming, curated by Elizabeth Ferrer at BRIC, New York (2013); Bronx Calling: The Second Bronx Biennial at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2013); Primary Sources at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012) and Lost and Found: Belief and Doubt in Contemporary Pictures at the Museum of New Art, Detroit (2012); Njideka Akunyili Crosby: I Refuse to be Invisible, at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, FL (2016); Before Now After (Mama, Mummy, Mamma), at the Whitney Museum of American Art Billboard Project, New York, NY (2016).
Collections
Akunyili Crosby’s work is in the collections of major museums including Yale University Art Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and Tate.
Recognition
In 2014, Akunyili Crosby was the recipient of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize.
Art market
Akunyili Crosby is represented by Victoria Miro Gallery, London, UK.
Her 2012 painting Drown, a technically innovative acrylic- and transfer-on-paper scene of embracing lovers, sold for $1.1 million at Sotheby’s in 2016, a record for the artist at auction and more than three times the high estimate of $300,000.
