Painter · Nigeria
Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a Nigerian-born painter, born in Enugu in 1983 and based in Los Angeles. Her large works on paper combine paint, charcoal, collage and photographic transfers to show domestic scenes that belong to Nigeria and the United States at the same time. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.
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From Enugu to the United States
Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in 1983 in Enugu, in south-eastern Nigeria. She left Nigeria for the United States at sixteen. Her mother, Dora Akunyili, was the director of NAFDAC, Nigeria's food and drug agency, and Njideka first meant to study medicine. After college she completed a post-baccalaureate certificate in painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2006 and an MFA at the Yale School of Art in 2011. She was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2011–12, and she lives and works in Los Angeles.
How the paintings are made
Her works are usually large sheets of paper, painted with figures in interiors: couples at a table, a woman on a sofa, a family room. Look closely and the surfaces are crowded with images. Walls, floors and even skin are filled in with photographs transferred onto the paper — pictures from Nigerian magazines, family albums, pop culture and political history.
Her titles often point to the same double life. Dwell: Aso Ebi takes its name from the practice in Nigeria of friends and relatives dressing in matching cloth for weddings and other celebrations; in 2017 the image was shown on the Hayward Gallery's billboard in London, so a picture about living between two countries was seen at billboard scale in London.
The transfers are the key. They let one image hold two places: an American living room whose walls are patterned with Lagos parties and Nigerian celebrities, or a figure whose clothing is printed with commemorative fabric. Nothing in the picture is purely here or purely there, which is what living between two countries feels like.
The Beautyful Ones
One of her best-known series, The Beautyful Ones, takes its title from Ayi Kwei Armah's 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Each painting shows a Nigerian child or young person, set against the same kind of layered, image-filled backgrounds; some of the sitters are members of her own family. The series turns a novel about post-independence disappointment into a set of portraits about a generation that has not yet decided what it will become.
Recognition
Akunyili Crosby's rise was fast. The Smithsonian American Art Museum gave her its James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize in 2014, and the Studio Museum in Harlem its $50,000 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize in 2015. Her first museum survey, I Refuse to Be Invisible, ran at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach from January to April 2016 and brought together fifteen large works made between 2010 and 2015. In 2017 the MacArthur Foundation awarded her one of its fellowships, often called "genius grants". In 2022–23 the Yale Center for British Art devoted a show to her, the third and last in a series curated by the writer Hilton Als, drawing on The Beautyful Ones.
Where to see the work
In 2016 the Whitney Museum of American Art bought Portals, and the Norton Museum acquired Super Blue Omo. Museums rarely hang a work on paper for long, because light damages it, so check a museum's collection pages and its current displays before you go.
Related artists
Her work is often paired with that of Wangechi Mutu, another artist who uses collage to think about bodies, migration and image culture. Her interest in how Nigerian modernity looks connects her to Ben Enwonwu, whose portraits shaped how Nigerians saw themselves half a century earlier. Collectors following her generation will find many of them at the African art fairs and biennales. See our lists of Nigerian artists and Nigerian painters.
