Njideka Akunyili Crosby
NJIDEKA AKUNYILI CROSBY
Born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1983, at age sixteen Njideka Akunyili Crosby immigrated to the United States to further pursue her education. After graduating from Swarthmore College, she moved on to Yale School of Art where her practice evolved and flourished; she received a Master of Fine Arts in 2011. Straddling her Nigerian identity as well as the American culture of her adopted home, a potent visual language emerged, generating a body of work in which a distinctive personal narrative explores origin, tradition, and iconography. By 2013, not long after a transformational residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Akunyili Crosby had already garnered critical acclaim, with exhibitions on two continents.
Through her art, a hybrid of painting, drawing, photo transfer, and collage, Akunyili Crosby implements the tools and techniques intrinsic to Western painting while weaving an intricate portrait of African history, dislocation, and the diaspora. With meticulous detail she traverses domestic life, splicing aspects of Nigerian culture into the elaborate mise en scène of each composition. Working methodically, precise vignettes emerge through a pastiche of family photos, home goods, native plants, interior design, textiles, and the rich history of her own life. The complex schisms inherent to the post-colonial ethos emerge with poetic clarity.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including a MacArthur Fellowship (2017); the Prix Canson (2016); Next Generation Prize, New Museum (2015); Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2015); and the James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize, The Smithsonian American Art Museum (2014), among others.
She has had numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious museums and galleries, among them Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT (2022), traveling to The Huntington, San Marino, CA; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX (2022), Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX (2018–2019); National Portrait Gallery, London (2018–2019); Baltimore Museum of Art (2017–2018); Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (2016); and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015–2016).
Her work is represented in renowned museum collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Museum of African Arts, Washington, DC; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate, UK; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town.
She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby was interviewed on July 26, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.
“Exactly what I wanted to make – the specifics weren’t clear, but I knew that I wanted to make work about my life. It was very clear to me how unique and different the life I had experienced in Nigeria is, or even how different Nigeria as a place is, so I knew that I wanted to tap into that.”
“Reading Chinua Achebe was very important for me because I did worry – ‘Oh, what if somebody doesn’t get this? I have to make sure everybody understands.’ I took a class on Caribbean diasporic literature and contemporary African literature, reading the writers Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Chinua Achebe, Bernardine Evaristo. It was very important to me to see how they write what they write – what they’re interested in – without worrying if it’s accessible to everyone.”
“People who are invested in painting can enjoy the work and enjoy all the knowledge that has been brought to the piece, but when a Nigerian is looking at it, it’s a whole other experience. And that’s okay. Everybody doesn’t have to have this same experience.”
