The world of the home is found everywhere in Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s work. The artist uses everyday objects as beacons that illuminate the cross sections of her life, from the kerosene lamp that sat on her grandmother’s table in Agulu, Nigeria, to a piece of Ikea furniture purchased for her adopted home of Los Angeles. When asked about her eclectic practice, she’s said that she aims to ‘create weird combinations so you end up in a no-man’s land – where there is enough that different people will recognise, but also enough out of reach.’
The ‘weird combinations’ in question are mixed-media works that draw together acrylic, coloured pencil, charcoal, pastel and photographic transfers, the lattermost formed by rubbing acetone on to images in order to burnish them onto her canvas. The result is a collage of visual motifs and physical materials that draw you in to an atmosphere, as opposed to any singular scene. She plays with the shapes of domestic architecture – doors, shutters, sofas and carpets intersect at unusual angles, flattening perspective and collapsing boundaries in a way that leaves you slightly wrong-footed.
As much as they valorize interiority, Akunyili Crosby’s works always reach outwards, too. Her transfer images blend original photographs from her travels with the political and pop culture iconography that have defined her identity, whether homegrown or imported. These shimmering graphic slices flow between solid walls and furnishings to adorn the bodies of her subjects, literally layering the complexities of a cosmopolitan, post-colonial African existence into her work. The technique is informed by the years she spent print-making while studying at Yale School of Art, where the thought process behind the physical construction of an image – be it silkscreen or monoprint – chimed with her conceptual vision.
In her ongoing series The Beautyful Ones, the artist takes the Ghanaian author Ayi Kweh Armah’s classic 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born to imagine the possibilities for a new generation, free from the corruption depicted in this text. Five of these works are presented in the latest (and final) iteration of a series of exhibitions curated by the Pulitzer Prize winning author Hilton Als, this time at the Huntington in San Marino, California. Als’s curatorial focus is on the artist’s work as ‘a world that is built out of layers, and deeply committed to the depth to be found on the surfaces that make up intimate and private spaces’.
The children Akunyili Crosby features in these canvases are almost entirely based on her own family, who are depicted in defining moments of childhood and adolescence, from school rituals to religious confirmations. The intimacy of home again plays an important role, specifically the plethora of hi-fi systems and audio-visual equipment that defined a well-to-do 1980s home. Never one to shy away from the messiness of family life, she also includes the veritable tangle of cables, extensions and plug sockets that powered this new lifestyle, in a nod to the chaos that lies just beyond the veneer of orderly domesticity.
‘The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby’ runs at The Huntington until 12 June 2023.
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