Nigerian-American visual artist, Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, on Tuesday, May 23, wowed the global art community with the showcase of her painting collections at the first David Zwirner’s Art Gallery exhibition in Los Angeles, United States of America.
Akunyili-Crosby is the second daughter of the late former National Agency for Food and Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC) Director General, Prof. Dora Akunyili.
The exhibition, titled ‘Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again’, saw the artist showcase a collection of her new and old paintings.
According to New York Times, the event which was billed to be a significant art world, talk about the length to which the artist will go in researching the scientific classification of plants to depict in one of her paintings — Madagascar Jasmine and Safari Sunset.
Discussing the process behind the self-portrait, “Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens,” which features her in patterned pants, holding her youngest child on the porch surrounded by lush greenery at her East Los Angeles studio recently, the 40-year old artist said she had a clear idea of what she wanted the plant to do.
“There was a certain amount of obscuring that had to happen. You can’t obscure the plants so much that you’re just seeing little pieces of it.
“Some plants are very dense. You had to see enough of the plants to make sense of it. But the plants also couldn’t be so thin that it just didn’t work.”
Akunyili-Crosby explained that she spent hours looking through pictures of flora and fauna from Nigeria and L.A., spending time in a plant store and visiting the Huntington art museum’s expansive botanical gardens, where she walked around all day “looking for a very particular leaf.”
“Normally I would have said, it takes me about three months to do a work, but it’s slowly been extending into longer. I’ve slowed down to get what I need. I always thought of my studio as a lab. I want to just go in there and cook and figure out what’s going on and make the pieces that are in my mind.
“Something I’ve been very clear about with everybody I work with is, my pace is slow and you cannot push me or force me to work faster. I am not a machine; I like taking my time. Because for me, my interest in the work is pretty much diminished after the work is done. I never want to feel like I am just plowing through,” she added.
Commending her works, David Zwirner, a German art dealer and the owner of David Zwirner Gallery in New York City, London, Hong Kong, and Paris said that Akunyili-Crosby’s work which includes new and recent paintings in the East Hollywood space designed by Selldorf Architects, was well worth waiting for.
His words: “We have to begin to understand this Nigerian artist’s slow and exacting approach, as well as why her new exhibition, inaugurating
“She has been able to create a new vernacular and a new iconography in contemporary visual culture. She brought to the art world her own language.”
“That language includes a mix of drawing, painting, collage and printmaking. Crosby’s work evokes scrapbooks or patchwork quilts that synthesize her Nigerian and American cultures through layers of visual signifiers, historical references and personal memories.
“Look closely at a Crosby painting and one continues to discover pieces of her past. Printed fabrics, articles of furniture or fashion, family members, book titles, architectural elements,” Zwirner added.
In a short remarks, Ian Alteveer, the Met’s curator of modern and contemporary art said “there are so many aspects of Akunyili-Crosby’s work that are transfixing — a combination of personal narrative, a larger cultural understanding and something trans-Atlantic.
“It is about generational families, it’s about migration; it’s about moving from Africa to the U.S and looking back always toward Africa, straddling both continents.”
He noted that the artist, who favours rainbow crocs and has an open-throated laugh, makes lists of what she wants in one of her paintings before she begins.
“In one recent work, for example, she knew that she wanted bars on the window akin to those she recalled from her childhood home in Nigeria, her wedding dress and an illustration from one of her elementary school textbooks.
“Pieces turn up in her paintings that are immediately recognizable to fellow Nigerians: a “Senator suit,” cabin biscuits, jerrycans, painted tea kettles, braided hairstyles, clonette dolls,” Alteveer stated.
Akunyili-Crosby uses items that nod to vestiges of the British Empire, American pop culture, Roman Catholicism. Her objects have this specificity that tells stories of place and time, and that is why she likes doing “still life”.
In 2015, Jamillah James, a former Studio Museum in Harlem curator and at the time, assistant curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, organised Akunyili-Crosby’s first solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum. That same year, James organised another exhibition of Akunyili Crosby’s work at Art and Practice in Los Angeles.
In 2016, she was named one of the “Financial Times Women of the Year.” That same year, a solo exhibition of her work was held at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. In 2017, she won the MacArthur Fellowship Genius grant.
In 2018, Akunyili Crosby designed the mural that wrapped the Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Avenue, Los Angeles. The mural features her signature style of combining painting with collage, printmaking, and drawing to create intricate, layered scenes. She was the second artist to create a mural for the site under a new initiative by the museum.
Her work is held by major institutions including the Met, the Tate and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and her prices reached more than $4.7 million at auction last fall.
