On initial impression her work appears to focus on interiors or apparently everyday scenes and social gatherings. Many of Akunyili Crosby's images feature figures - images of family and friends - in scenarios derived from familiar domestic experiences: eating, drinking, watching TV. Rarely do they meet the viewer's gaze but seem bound up in moments of intimacy or reflection that are left open to interpretation. Ambiguities of narrative and gesture are underscored by a second wave of imagery, only truly discernible close-up. Vibrantly patterned photo-collage areas are created from images derived from Nigerian pop culture and politics, including pictures of pop stars, models and celebrities, as well as lawyers in white wigs and military dictators. Some of these images are from the artist's archive of personal snapshots, magazines and advertisements, while others are sourced from the internet. These elements present a compelling visual metaphor for the layers of personal memory and cultural history that inform and heighten the experience of the present.

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. Religious art, the intimism of Edouard Vuillard's intoxicatingly patterned interiors, the academic tradition of portraiture and, in particular, still life painting become vehicles for delivering, Trojan horse-like, new possible meanings.

These are images necessarily complicated in order to counter generalisations about African or diasporic experience. Talking about her work, Akunyili Crosby notes, 'In much the same way that inhabitants of formerly colonised countries select and invent from cultural features transmitted to them by the dominant or metropolitan colonisers, I extrapolate from my training in Western painting to invent a new visual language that represents my experience - which at times feels paradoxically fractured and whole - as a cosmopolitan Nigerian.' 

About the artist

Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship and 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  2020 Carnegie Corporation “Great Immigrant, Great American” Award; the 2019 African Art Award; the 2016 Prix Canson Prize; the 2015 Foreign Policy's Leading 100 Global Thinkers of 2015 Prize; the 2015 Next Generation Prize, New Museum of Contemporary Art; the 2015 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, and the 2014 Smithsonian American Art Museum's James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize.

Recent selected solo exhibitions include The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Huntington, California; The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, USA (2022-23); Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, USA (2022);"The Beautyful Ones", Victoria Miro Venice, Italy (2019); "The Beautyful Ones", National Portrait Gallery, London, UK (2018–2019); 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).

Recent group exhibitions include Brave New World, Museum de Fundatie Zwolle, the Netherlands; Women Painting Women, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, USA; The Story of Art as it’s Still Being Written, Victoria Miro, London, UK; Intimacy, Victoria Miro, London, UK; Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now, Tate Britain, London, UK (2021-2022); Toward Common Cause: Art, Social change, and The MacArthur Fellows Program at 40, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Illinois, USA (2021); Pushing the Margins: A Survey of LA Artists, Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger, Norway (2021); Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale, PAFA, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (2021); Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA;  Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, USA (2021); Art Finds a Way, The Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, Florida, USA (2021); The Power of My Hands, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, France (2021); This is Not Africa – Unlearn What You Have Learned, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark (2021); the 7th Biennial of Painting: Inner Spaces, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium (2020); Interiorities at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2020); I am... Contemporary Women Artists of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC, USA; Radical Revisionists: Contemporary African Artists Confronting Past and Present, Moody Centre for the Arts, Houston, Texas, USA (2020); The Power Of My Hands, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, France (2020); May You Live In Interesting Times, La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Ralph Rugoff (2019); Rock My Soul (Curated by Isaac Julien), Victoria Miro Gallery, London, UK (2019); There I Belong. Hammershøi by Elmgreen & Dragset, SMK, Copenhagen, (2019).

Additionally, Akunyili Crosby has exhibited at institutional venues including; MCA Chicago, Chicago, USA (2019); National Portrait Gallery, London, UK (2018 & 2020); The Metropolitan Museum, NY, USA (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016 & 2019); the New Museum, New York (2015); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014); Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2014); Landcommandery of Alden-Biesen, Bilzen, Belgium (2014); BRIC, New York (2013); Bronx Museum, New York (2013); and the Museum of New Art Detroit (2012).

Her work is in the collections of major museums including Yale University Art Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Tate, The Norton Museum of Art, Zeitz MOCAA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Public projects include an outdoor mural for MOCA Los Angeles Grand Avenue [2018]; and Remain, Thriving, 2018 the first commission in a new programme at Brixton station, London.

Akunyili Crosby’s work features in the third 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, Connecticut. The show, titled The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, is currently on view at The Huntington, San Marino, California, through until 12 June 2023.