Awareness Post: Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Blend in - Stand out, 2019. Acrylic, colored pencil, charcoal, and photographic transfers on paper 95 3/4 x 123 3/4 inches

Njideka Akunyili Crosby creates densely layered figurative works that reflect her hybrid identity as someone raised in Nigeria and living in the United States. She combines drawing and painting with photo-transferred images and collage on paper, embedding printed photographs, magazine imagery, and personal archives directly into her compositions.

Her works often depict quiet domestic scenes with family and friends, while the layered paper imagery (sourced from Nigerian pop culture, politics, and media) acts as a visual record of memory and cultural history. By merging these paper-based layers with Western painting traditions, she uses the medium itself to express the complexity of contemporary, diasporic experience.

She is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate of Art from Otis College of Art, 2024, and Swarthmore College in 2019, a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship and was awarded Financial Times' Women of the Year, 2016, alongside the Future Generation Art Prize 2017 Shortlist. She is the recipient of the Prix Canson Prize, 2016, Foreign Policy's Leading 100 Global Thinkers of 2015, the Next Generation Prize, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015, the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, 2015, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize, 2014.

Recent solo exhibitions include Front Room: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Baltimore Museum of Art (2018) alongside Prospect.4, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, New Orleans, Louisiana (2018); Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Predecessors, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, which toured to Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2017); Portals, Victoria Miro, London (2016), I Refuse to be Invisible, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (2016) and The Beautyful Ones, Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2015), staged concurrently with a solo presentation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015).

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Compound Dwellers

2024

Acrylic and transfers on paper

63 3/4 x 60 in

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

“The Beautyful Ones”

Series #9

2018

Acrylic, color pencil, transfers, and collage on paper

75 x 75 1/2 in

I picked this artist because her work looks like a combination of different techniques I have either tried or really enjoy looking at. Collage has been an art form that I've posted about before and something I find really powerful. I actually did a photo transfer in my sketchbook Sophomore or Junior year and forgot about. Now, after looking at this work I'm interested in trying to incorporate it. Right now I'm at a crossroads with my work, but her style and medium resembles a path that I could pursue. Her realistic elements and concrete theme are both aspects that I think I am missing in my work.