The Artist: Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983, Njideka Akunyili Crosby has called the United States home since the age of 16. Now living and working in Los Angeles, the gifted visual artist has exhibited her large-scale works in New York, Milan, London, and Belgium, as well as her current home city. Luxury Defined caught up with her at her 2015 solo show Hammer Projects: Njideka Akunyili Crosby. 

What was your childhood ambition?
My childhood ambition was to be a doctor. My father was a doctor and my earliest memories include perusing medical journals and being fascinated by diseases.

What is your earliest memory of “art”?
I remember seeing sculptures in the traffic islands in the middle of roundabouts en route to my primary school, but I didn’t give them much conscious thought. It wasn’t until secondary school, when we learned about the great Nigerian artists such as Ladi Kwali, Yusuf Grillo, Bruce Onobrakpeya, and Ben Enwonwu that I began to pay attention to art.

You were born in Nigeria and moved to the United States at 16. Why did you move?
To go to university – I moved right after my secondary-school graduation.

What was your impression of the U.S. when you arrived? How has growing up in two cultures influenced your work?
It was hot! My first trip to America was over a summer vacation during secondary school. My siblings and I spent that summer staying with an uncle in New York City who refused to run his air conditioner. I had never experienced oppressive humidity like that. Coming to America was the ultimate fantasy for us and our peers, so my siblings and I were shocked to find ourselves yearning for home partway through the summer. Ha! We even amused ourselves by singing a popular Nigerian song about a village farmer in the city yearning for his past life, hard work and all: “I done tire, I done tire/I dey go back to my village/I dey go plant coco/I dey go plant cassava/Even if na yam/I dey go back to my village.”

My experiences of syncretic cultures provide the subject matter of my complex compositions

Tell us about your work – your chosen media and what inspires you.
The way I mix painting with drawing, printmaking, photography, and collage in my work underscores the theme of transculturation in my life. In other words, my integration of different materials and images creates a visual metaphor for people’s experience of the space where multiple cultures interact – for example, in a post-colonial, immigrant, or other scenario. My experiences of syncretic cultures – I grew up in a Nigeria acculturated to, and independent from, Britain and immigrated to the United States as an adult – provide the subject matter of my complex compositions. In my large-scale works on paper, I interweave transferred and collaged snapshots of contemporary Nigerian life into painted autobiographical scenes of my childhood in Nigeria and adult life in America with my husband. The tactility and visual impact of the painting resolves the clash between my disparate media and images into a cohesive overall image. Thus, in much the same way that inhabitants of formerly colonized countries select and invent from cultural features transmitted to them by the dominant or metropolitan colonizers, 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 American.

You sometimes appear in your work with your back turned to the viewer or only partially in view. Why?
The figure’s body and head positions serve different purposes in different pieces. In some works, the figure has her back to the viewer in order to allow the viewer to be a fly on the wall and observe a private moment. Also, this positioning without a (facial) portrait keeps the identity of the subject open, so that she can be understood to be a young Nigerian woman and not specifically me. This anonymity encourages an allegorical read. For instance, as the title I Always Face You, Even When it Seems Otherwise suggests, that painting’s main figure facing away from the viewer, toward another subject of the painting, is analogous to an individual preserving her loyalty to her heritage in spite of appearances and realities of committing to new worlds.

Who from the art world have been your influences?
My influences stretch from artists to people in other creative fields – writers, musicians, fashion designers, etc. I am drawn to the paintings of Velázquez, Manet, Vuillard, Alex Katz, Wangechi Mutu, Luc Tuymans, and Kerry James Marshall, to mention just a few. The photography of Malick Sidibé and Nontsikelelo Veleko has heavily influenced my work, as have the writings of Chinua Achebe, Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, Wole Soyinka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Junot Díaz, and other contemporary African and Caribbean diasporic and post-colonial authors.

Which is your favorite artwork (by another artist) and why?
Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (2009) at the Yale University Art Gallery is probably my favorite artwork. I saw it as a graduate student there, and it stopped me in my tracks. It is a bold figurative painting where the artist shows his mastery of the different languages of mark-making, from gestural abstraction to geometric abstraction to paint-by-numbers to subtle rendering of sensual flesh. His use of different visual languages resonates with my practice. It’s hard to find a relevant mode of figurative painting because it’s been done so well for so long, so it’s invigorating and exciting to see a work like Untitled (2009) that reinvents the form while simultaneously participating in the history, and critiquing its exclusion of women and people of color.

What music do you listen to? And do you have music playing while you work?
Sometimes I play music while I work and other times I don’t. I listen to a bit of everything: pop songs, old-school Nigerian music, contemporary Nigerian pop, musicals, Motown. Sometimes I’ll listen to the same song on repeat all day as background music. Needless to say, this drives everyone who shares a space with me crazy, so I’ve had to cut back on that… or wear headphones. Occasionally I’ll put on one of my guilty-pleasure movies or TV shows and have it playing while I work.

What is your home like?
I think of my apartment as a space for me to relax after a long day at the studio, so I consciously wanted to keep the visual noise and stimulation to a minimum. We have artworks from friends up on the wall, but other than that, the space is very basic. Our living room, for instance, has a couch, a rug, a recliner, a coffee table, lamps, and nothing else. I think my (limited? sparse?) sense of interior decoration is a carry-over from Nigeria, where most households, regardless of class and means, have only the essential furnishings in each room.

What is your studio like?
I moved into a new studio early this year [2015]. It is huge, with a partially open floor plan. I share it with my husband, who is also an artist, and another friend. We love working in the same space and the resulting small community. We have a backyard and on cool evenings we can all be found relaxing and chatting out there (in fact, I’m writing from the picnic table outside right now). My work area oscillates between being very messy and very clean. While working on a piece, I have photo printouts strewn all over the floor, small ink and color studies taped up on the wall, paint containers spread around the space, and little bits of blue tape hanging on the walls. Once a work is done, I spend a day cleaning up, and in this in-between phase my area of the studio is immaculate.

Your husband has appeared in your work. How does he feel about this?
My husband is incredibly supportive so he’s glad to help in any way he can. He knows that my work is often autobiographical, so it follows that he would feature prominently in my narrative. It also helps that he’s an artist, so he understands the importance of my liberty to source images from my life without censorship. On one of the early days we spent time with each other as undergraduates, I asked him (or, as he remembers it, he offered) to sit for a painting, so he knew what he was getting into. And if he has a problem with it, I’d remind him that he encouraged me to do art and not medicine, so it’s his own doing – haha!

What book are you reading at the moment?
I am reading A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language by Brenda Cooper, and Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

What is your signature style?
On a day-to-day basis, I wear beat-up, comfy clothes to my studio, so when I have occasion to dress up, I might overdo it a bit. I love bright colors and patterns on classic silhouettes. I’ve always gravitated toward shift dresses and recently I’ve been into jumpsuits.

What is your guilty pleasure?
Pride and Prejudice in any form – the book, the long BBC TV adaptation, the various short movie versions – I can quote most of it verbatim!

What are your upcoming projects?
I have a solo museum show at the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Florida. Njideka Akunyili Crosby: I Refuse to Be Invisible runs from January 28 to April 24, 2016.