Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a leading contemporary artist whose work offers critical perspectives on postcolonial history and experience as well as transnational identities. Drawing on art historical, political and personal references, Akunyili Crosby creates densely layered figurative compositions that, precise in style, nonetheless conjure the complexity of contemporary experience. Akunyili Crosby was born in Nigeria, where she lived until the age of sixteen. In 1999, she moved to the United States, where she has remained since that time. Her cultural identity combines strong attachments to the country of her birth and to her adopted home, a hybrid identity that is reflected in her work. While the artist's formative years in Nigeria are a constant source of inspiration, Akunyili Crosby's grounding in Western art history adds further layers of reference.

Akunyili Crosby has described her desire as an artist to “center Black life, my experience as a Black woman, and the complexity of Black life—and to infuse every piece I make with…this deep love I have for my Black experience.” Receiving the prestigious MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 2017, Akunyili Crosby was also the subject of a trilogy of solo exhibitions curated by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and critic Hilton Als at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, in 2022. Her work is held in significant museum collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Baltimore Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); and National Museum of African Arts, Washington, D.C..