NJIDEKA AKUNYILI CROSBY | UNTITLED

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner 

“Sometimes I get too tied down by a certain way of painting or drawing, and I have to break out of it. It helped me early on not to do faces. Often I just want to note: This is a woman. Or: This is a woman from there who doesn’t make sense here. It doesn’t always matter what her face looks like, and it helps me if I carefully orchestrate the composition so it’s not about portraiture.”

(Njideka Akunyili Crosby, in converstion with Erica Ando, “Njideka Akunyili Crosby by Erica Ando”, BOMB Magazine, Issue #137, 15 September 2016)

Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby is best known for her variety of vibrant patterns, most notably combined by transposing hundreds of photographic images. As Cheryl Brutvan explains in her essay for the exhibition catalogue accompanying Akunyili Crosby’s 2016 solo exhibition, I Refuse to Be Invisible, at the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, her patterns evoke narratives of familiar scenes that,

“distinguished Akunyili Crosby’s realism, which features seemingly unremarkable, comfortable relationships and environments… She avoids provocative poses and glances among her participants that might suggest an underlying emotional game… Akunyili Crosby continues the long history in the arts of creating work based on what is known and seen; a preoccupation with the quotidian allows the artist to discover it as a resource for greater artistic challenges imbued with significant meaning” (pp. 11-12)

This example of Akunyili Crosby’s work was executed during her time as an MFA student at Yale, and though absent of her recognizable image transfers, maintains the compositional elements of her notable domestic scenes and thus may have been a study for larger painting. A faceless figure on the left of a dining table appears to walk towards an open door in the background, invariably though perhaps unintentionally reminding us of Velázquez’s Las Meninas.

Akunyili Crosby has noted the significance of faceless figures in her drawings, distinguishing her intentions as a departure from traditional portraiture. She has also acknowledged her admiration towards and influence by the work of Kerry James Marshall and the theme of blackness in her paintings. Both of these attributes, in addition to the choice of black paper utilized in the present work, seem to nod to her intentions in exploring and accentuating blackness as an important theme in this early drawing. The artist deftly utilizes a reflective form of graphite that requires the viewer to actively move around the work in order to recognize it’s full effect – from some perspectives, the figure and domestic interior are hardly visible, however when the perspective is shifted, they are fully distinguishable with shining splendor. This may be, therefore, another iteration by the artist refusing to be invisible.