Boss Women of the Art World: Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Jul 22

Mid-way through the bombshell art-market documentary The Price of Everything, the scene shifts to the soft white interior of LA-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s studio. The artist and camera crew are watching, via live stream on a laptop, a 2016 Sotheby’s auction at which Akunyili Crosby’s piece “Drown” has been estimated to sell for $300,000. Over the course of the next few minutes, all sit with bated breath as the bids come in, rocketing past the estimate to settle out at a $1,092,500 sale, the profits of which, after Sotheby’s takes its commission, rest firmly with the seller, resignedly labelled a “flipper” by Akunyili Crosby, who does not benefit financially from the sale (LA Times). Two years later, Sotheby’s would auction another work of Akunyili Crosby’s for over $3,000,000.

Though reflective of an unfortunate, unrectified reality of the art market, the moment beautifully introduces its audience to Akunyili Crosby, who is now represented by the alpha-tier galleries Victoria Miro and David Zwirner. Her work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Art Museum, Tate Modern, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Arts, amongst numerous others. Born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983, Akunyili Crosby relocated to the United States when she was sixteen and went on to earn a BA with honours from Swarthmore College in 2004, from which she also received an honorary doctorate in 2019, and her MFA from Yale University in 2011.

Akunyili Crosby’s intimately personal work reflects a myriad of inspirations gathered from her experience growing up in what she terms “hybrid cultures,” like post-colonial Nigeria and the infamous melting pot of the United States (SF MoMA). “The overarching theme in the work is the point of union between two cultures,” Akunyili Crosby states, and such cultures are carefully knit together on the patchwork surface of her canvases (SF MoMA). Akunyili Crosby works in a mixed media style, combining acrylic paint, coloured pencil, charcoal, and photo transfers in different iterations. Her palette is vibrant but not overwhelming, with similar tones and patterns running from one piece to the next as a cohesive glue that marries them all together. Educated in the formal European tradition of visual art, Akunyili Crosby’s work is highly technically proficient, though she does not let such formalism limit her. While she acknowledges the importance of such a foundation for her practice, she aspires to “take this tradition and let something else grow out of it, invent from it, and transform it” (SF MoMA).

While her subject matter is largely composed of people and social scenes, it feels wrong to categorize her work as simply “portraiture.” The 19th century moniker “genre scene” might fare better, but even then, it imposes a level of superficiality or detachment antithetical to Akunyili Crosby’s multicultural quilts. Her narrative depictions are sourced from public and personal cultural archives and historical memories, and the inset images in the photo collage transfers capture layers of meaning, additional to the primary composition, with which the larger work becomes infused. The figures in the paintings only occasionally address the viewers with their gazes; instead, their attention largely remains focused inward, maintaining a degree of distance in the otherwise intimate space of the works (Victoria Miro).

Akunyili Crosby’s paintings beautifully weave together the cultural communities of which she is a member, both edifying Western audiences to the nuances of Nigerian society—the still life arrangements allude to motifs of Nigerian households, while the commemorative “portrait fabric” custom made for special events lends itself as a background—and acknowledging her current culture of residence with the recurrence of her husband and American pop-culture references. She has invented “a new visual language that represents my experience - which at times feels paradoxically fractured and whole - as a cosmopolitan Nigerian” (Victoria Miro).

In 2018, Akunyili Crosby installed an enormous mural project on the façade of the Los Angeles MoCA, bathing almost a full city block in her atmospheric painting. The mural twisted the inside outward as the exterior walls of the building were replaced with interior visions of domestic life. Akunyili Crosby was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, was named the Financial Times Woman of the Year in 2016, and was featured in the 59th Venice Biennale as curated by Ralph Rugoff (Victoria Miro).

Boss Women of the Art World: Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Further Reading:

HOME

Boss Women of the Art World: Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Further Reading:

Lorna Tiller in Conversation with I LIKE NETWORKING

Boss Women of the Art World: Bee Trofort

HOME