Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a Nigerian American painter, born in Enugu in 1983, who moved to the United States at sixteen and now lives in Los Angeles. She builds large pictures of homes from paint and from photographs transferred onto the surface. Her best known work is The Beautyful Ones, a portrait of her older sister that sold at Christie's in 2017 for more than three million dollars.
Her pictures look calm from across a room, and only up close do they show how much is packed into them. One of them, a portrait of a girl standing alone, changed the painter's career in a single day.
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On 7 March 2017, Christie's in London offered The Beautyful Ones, a picture she had made in 2012. The estimate ran from $488,800 to $733,200. Six bidders competed by telephone, and it sold for $3,075,774 with fees, more than four times the high estimate. Her previous record was Drown, a picture of herself and her husband, which had sold in November for nearly $1.1 million.
The picture shows one girl standing alone. Asked about her by the curator Cheryl Brutvan, in an interview for an exhibition catalogue, the painter answered plainly: "The girl in the glasses is my parents' first child, my sister, when she was younger." It is the first and largest work in a series she was still adding to.
The record stood for fourteen months. On 16 May 2018, at Sotheby's in New York, Bush Babies sold for $3,375,000 with fees, against an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. She had given the picture to a sale that benefited the Studio Museum in Harlem. It has no one in it: the figures she usually paints are gone, and the people survive only as small images hidden in the foliage.
What You'll Discover
Why she left Enugu at sixteen.
How one portrait became a series.
Whose fabric covers the wallpaper.
What hides inside the floor.
Where her pictures hang today.