Name Njideka Crosby | ||
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The artist project njideka akunyili crosby
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 home in 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 personal imagery that transcends the specificity of individual experience and engages in a global dialogue about trenchant social and political issues.
Contents
- The artist project njideka akunyili crosby
- Njideka akunyili crosby inhabiting multiple spaces tateshots
- Early life and education
- Influences
- Career
- Exhibitions
- Collections
- Recognition
- Art market
- References
A hallmark of her compositions is the layering and collaging of small photographic images. Many of the images used are from Nigerian magazines or were taken by the artist with her own camera during visits to Nigeria. She photocopies pictures from various sources such as wedding albums and magazines and transfers them to paper using acetone solvent.
Njideka akunyili crosby inhabiting multiple spaces tateshots
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.
Influences
Akunyili Crosby cites classic and contemporary painters as influences, and draws on her experience as a Nigerian woman living in America in her work. Her ethnic heritage and African experiences informs her art and challenges the myth of an "authentic African." Akunyili Crosby layers domestic settings of living rooms, families and couple with images from Nigerian culture and everyday life for collage backgrounds.
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).
Exhibitions
2016
2015
2013
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, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and Tate.
Recognition
In 2011, Akunyili Crosby was an Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum.
In 2014, Akunyili Crosby was the recipient of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize.
In June 2016, she was awarded Prix Canson, an internationally-recognized prize for art on paper. Akunyili Crosby won the 2015 Next Generation Prize by New Museum, an award for emerging artists and the Wein Prize from the Studio Museum, cited for her "great innovation and promise." She was also recognized as the top of 10 black artists to celebrate in 2016.
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.