Njideka Akunyili Crosby: The Complete Story
Njideka Akunyili Crosby is the Nigerian born painter of layered domestic scenes, living rooms where Lagos and Los Angeles share the same table. Born in Enugu in 1983, she won a MacArthur genius grant at 34 and set auction records before she turned 35.
Her interiors look quiet until you step close and the surfaces start talking. Here is how she builds them, and why the art world moved so fast.
Enugu, then America at sixteen
She grew up in Enugu, Nigeria, one of six children; her mother, Dora Akunyili, later became famous across Africa as the regulator who fought counterfeit medicines.
At sixteen, in 1999, Njideka came to the United States, studied at Swarthmore, and took her MFA at Yale in 2011. The work has lived between those two homes ever since.
How the surfaces are built
From a distance her pictures read as calm painted interiors.
Up close, the skin of them is made of hundreds of small photographic transfers, images from Nigerian magazines, family albums and pop culture pressed into the surface with solvent, so that memory literally patterns the walls, the fabrics and the bodies.
She calls the merged space the two worlds make a third thing, fully hers.
Akunyili Crosby at a glance:
Born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1983; moved to the United States at 16.
Her mother, Dora Akunyili, famously fought counterfeit drugs as a Nigerian official.
Builds paintings from acrylic, pencil, and photo-transferred Nigerian imagery.
MacArthur genius grant in 2017.
Canvases have brought over 3 million dollars at auction.
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The myth: collage
Her work is often described as collage, and she gently rejects the word. Nothing is pasted on. The transferred images sit inside the paint layer itself, fused with acetone, worked over in acrylic and pencil.
It is painting that absorbs photography, not paper stuck to a canvas, and the difference is the whole point: the two cultures are not attached, they are inseparable.
The fastest rise in contemporary painting
She showed in the Venice Biennale in 2015, won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and in May 2018 her painting Bush Babies sold at Sotheby's for 3.4 million dollars, less than seven years after her degree show. In 2018 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles put her work on the outside of the building, a giant facade commission facing Grand Avenue, free to anyone driving past.
Where to see Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Major museums on both sides of the Atlantic hold her work, Tate in London among them, and David Zwirner represents her. The paintings are slow to make and few, so exhibitions travel and sell out; when one surfaces near you, go and stand close.
The transfer technique, up close
She soaks magazine and family photographs in solvent and rubs them face-down into the paper, ghosting Nigerian pop culture into the skin of her scenes.
Stand close and a tablecloth dissolves into hundreds of tiny portraits: musicians, ads, her mother's campaigns. The domestic scene is printed on memory.
Two countries at one table
Her interiors seat Nigeria and America together: wax-print fabrics, Igbo weddings, a Los Angeles couch, her American husband.
The subject is the hyphen itself, lived at kitchen scale. She has called the work counter-history: the Nigeria of family joy that news imagery never shows.
From Lagos market prints to museum walls
The market for her work exploded in the late 2010s, with resales in the millions, and she responded by slowing production and placing work directly with museums.
The National Portrait Gallery, Tate, and the Whitney hold her now. Few painters have managed a boom with that much control.
The Njideka Akunyili Crosby questions that keep coming up
What is she known for? Large domestic interiors whose surfaces are built from photographic transfers of Nigerian imagery.
Where is she from? Enugu, Nigeria, born in 1983; she has lived in the United States since 1999 and works in Los Angeles.
What is her auction record? Bush Babies sold for 3.4 million dollars at Sotheby's in May 2018.
Who is her mother? Dora Akunyili, the celebrated Nigerian regulator who led the war on counterfeit medicines.
What is in the photo transfers? Nigerian magazines, family albums, and images of her mother's public health campaigns, solvent-pressed into the paper as a second layer of story.
Who was Dora Akunyili? Her mother, the Nigerian regulator celebrated for fighting counterfeit medicines, who appears repeatedly in the transferred imagery.
More secrets to unlock
One last fact
The series that made her name is called The Beautyful Ones, after the novel by Ayi Kwei Armah, and it is a set of portraits of Nigerian children, her own family among them. The title's misspelling is the novelist's, kept on purpose: a broken word for a generation still being written.