“Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I_ remembered with an outsize intensity. These were the things that had been solidified in my mind by reiteration, that recurred in dreams and daily thoughts: certain faces, certain conversations.”_
—Teju Cole, “Open City”
Like so many middle- and upper-class Africans of her generation, the painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby came to the United States to pursue her studies. Military dictatorship and financial hardships had long paralyzed the higher-education system in her home country. Born in the early eighties and raised in Enugu, Nigeria, she graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and, later, from Yale University School of Art, where she refined her drawing, an art she had practiced since childhood. Now a painter living and working in Los Angeles, Akunyili Crosby creates works that capture the intimate universes of an African diaspora situated between two worlds.
Her paintings depict, in stunning detail, domestic interiors and private social gatherings. Akunyili Crosby, who was recently awarded the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Wein Prize, cites the influence of classic and contemporary painters—Édouard Vuillard, Alex Katz, Chris Ofili. But her work is also very much indebted to photography—not just to fine-art photographers like J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere and Malick Sidibé but to the vernacular imagery of her home country. Every time she returns from Nigeria, she brings back hundreds of photos she has taken with her own camera, from family portraits to snapshots from the pages of popular Nigerian life-style magazines.
These photos, gathered over multiple journeys to the Continent, are layered in her works by collage and acetone-transfer prints, creating a fabric of images throughout her paintings. A close look at her pieces reveals the recurrence of three pictures in particular: a headshot of the popular Nollywood actress Genevieve Nnaji, whose swept-back afro gives her the look of a Blaxploitation heroine; a portrait of the singer and televangelist Chris Okotie, whose red jacket evokes Michael Jackson’s in “Thriller”; and a row of Nigerian lawyers wearing solemn white wigs, a visual vestige of British colonial presence. Such images reflect Akunyili Crosby’s notion of Nigeria as a “contact and confluence zone”—a site of continuous cultural transfers with the United States and Britain. “My work is based on my autobiography,” she told me. “And I feel like my journey has created a character or person who doesn’t fit in any box.” Referring to a well-known TED Talk by the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” she described her painted scenes as “neither Nigeria nor America.”
Perhaps the most striking works in Akunyili Crosby’s series are those that portray sensual moments between a loving couple. In one piece, a black woman embraces her white lover, who is sprawled face down across a bed. The woman’s skin is covered in photographs, her body a collage of images, and her kisses seem to exhale pictures, leaving faint imprints across her lover’s skin.
