“Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s paintings exhibit both a generous opulence and a tender grace, taking small moments of intimacy and imbuing them with a meticulously ordered magnificence.”
Tenderly kissing her husband’s back, Njideka Akunyili Crosby reflects on the sensibilities of her transnational experiences in Thread from 2012, a paragon of the Nigerian-born and Los Angeles-based artist’s critically acclaimed visual tapestries. Intricately crafted from selected fragments of personal photographs and Nigerian lifestyle magazines, Akunyili Crosby’s depictions of domestic scenes combine collage with painting into a new visual language that materializes the nuances of her cultural hybridity – or, in the artist’s words, her “Afropolitanism”. Thread dates to 2012, the first year of Akunyili Crosby’s mature practice, and emerges from this critical period of the artist’s career between her graduation from Yale University School of Art in 2011 and the onset of her continued critical and commercial success. Attesting to its significance within the artist’s accomplished career, Thread was prominently included in the New Museum Triennial of 2015 and has since been exhibited at Njideka Akunyili Crosby: I Refuse to be Invisible at the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach in 2016 and Le Grand Balcon: La Biennale de Montréal at Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal in 2016-17. Seamlessly entwining acrylic, charcoal, pastel, colored pencil and Xerox transfer into a wholly inventive composition, Thread reveals an artistic practice that is as interdisciplinary as it is intercultural.
Deeply tied to diasporic experiences and the intersectional complexities of history and identity, Akunyili Crosby’s work explores how different heritages carried at the same t.mes could be made visible. Having emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen, Akunyili Crosby’s formative years in her native Nigeria are a constant source of inspiration, and her grounding in Western art history adds further layers of reference to her work. As Akunyili Crosby powerfully reflects, “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 t.mes s feels paradoxically fractured and whole – as a cosmopolitan Nigerian.” (The artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., Surround Audience: New Museum Triennial, New York, New Museum, 2015, p. 81) By extending the canon of Western figurative painting with the sociocultural and visual vernacular of her home culture in such paintings as Thread, Akunyili Crosby articulates the nuanced joys and challenges of the transcultural perspective that she embodies.
“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 t.mes s feels paradoxically fractured and whole – as a cosmopolitan Nigerian.”
Thread is a quintessential example of Akunyili Crosby’s ability to materialize the depths of her personal experience into her own visual language. Her husband’s body is mostly painted here, whereas Akunyili Crosby's is constructed of a diversity of visual sources ranging from Nollywood movie posters and historical photographs of Nigerian princes and further distinguished by her hairstyle of Nigerian threads. “The dark skin of the woman kissing her lighter-skinned lover’s spine is not brown or black, but composed of the artist’s signature image mâche. Her skin shares the collaged surface of the room in which they make love; what she is made of – acrylic, charcoal, pastel, coloured pencil and Xerox transfers – rubs off on him,” writes Simone White. “Where she has touched him, he is smeared with the image-memory of her love.” (Simone White, “Skin, or Surface: Njideka Akunyili Crosby,” Frieze, Iss. 194, 9 March 2018 (online)) The tender touch of Akunyili’s body upon that of her husband leaves behind faint imprints of collaged imagery, symbols of her Nigerian identity that are laden with cultural meaning and value and then passed on. At the forefront of the composition, the vibrant chromatic contrast between the canary yellow photocollages and the ultramarine patterns is spellbinding, luring the viewer into the intimacy of this moment set in a lavishly mint green room. By capturing a romantic experience that Akunyili Crosby shares with her husband here, Thread powerfully bespeaks an affectionate and autobiographical process of transcultural exchange.
Inviting the viewer into the artist’s own profoundly personal universe, Thread reflects the nuances of a modern romance in a globalized society indelibly marked by diasporic exchange and intercultural connections. Through her mesmerizing blend of mixed media, Akunyili Crosby opens new visual dimensions of contemporary storytelling that open room for a rich diversity of personal experiences. In the words of curator Thelma Golden, a vocal advocate for the artist, “[Akunyili Crosby] reimagines painting as a space to explore identity, culture, and history… She has done so in ways that are really broad in their set of painterly references, but deep in the way she’s mining her own very interesting story.” (Thelma Golden, “Nigerian Artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby is Painting the Afropolitan Story in America,” W Magazine, August 15, 2017, n.p.)
