Dora Akunyili’s Daughter Showcases Artworks in Los Angeles Tuesday

Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, a Nigerian-American artist and the second daughter of late Prof. Dora Akunyili, is set to showcase the collections of her paintings at a new exhibition — inaugurating David Zwirner’s first Los Angeles gallery Tuesday, May 23rd.

The event which is billed to be like a significant art world, would talk about the lengths to which she’ll go in researching the scientific classification of plants to depict in one of her paintings — Madagascar Jasmine and Safari Sunset.

In a recent conversation at her East Los Angeles studio, discussing the process behind the self-portrait, “Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens,” which features her in patterned pants, holding her youngest child on the porch surrounded by lush greenery. She said she had a clear idea of what she wanted the plant to do.
Crosby, 40, continued: “There was a certain amount of obscuring that had to happen. You can’t obscure the pants so much that you’re just seeing little pieces of it. Some plants are very dense. You had to see enough of the pants to make sense of it. But the plants also couldn’t be so thin that it just didn’t work.”
 
She spent hours looking through pictures of flora and fauna from Nigeria and L.A., spending time in a plant store and visiting the Huntington art museum’s expansive botanical gardens, where she walked around all day “looking for a very particular leaf.”
 
“Normally I would have said, it takes me about three months to do a work, but it’s slowly been extending into longer. I’ve slowed down to get what I need. I always thought of my studio as a lab. I want to just go in there and cook and figure out what’s going on and make the pieces that are in my mind,” she said.
Njideka continued: “Something I’ve been very clear about with everybody I work with is, my pace is slow and you cannot push me or force me to work faster. I am not a machine; I like taking my time. Because for me, my interest in the work is pretty much diminished after the work is done. I never want to feel like I am just plowing through.”
Commending her works, David Zwirner, a German art dealer and the owner of David Zwirner gallery in New York City, London, Hong Kong, and Paris said that Njideka’s work in the exhibition “Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again”, which includes new and recent paintings in the East Hollywood space designed by Selldorf Architects, was well worth waiting for. We have to begin to understand this Nigerian artist’s slow and exacting approach, as well as why her new exhibition, inaugurating.
“She has been able to create a new vernacular and a new iconography in contemporary visual culture. She brought to the art world her own language,” he said.
“That language includes a mix of drawing, painting, collage and printmaking. Crosby’s work evokes scrapbooks or patchwork quilts that synthesize her Nigerian and American cultures through layers of visual signifiers, historical references and personal memories”
“Look closely at a Crosby painting and one continues to discover pieces of her past. Printed fabrics, articles of furniture or fashion, family members, book titles, architectural elements,” said Zwirner.
 
In a short remarks, Ian Alteveer, the Met’s curator of modern and contemporary art said there are so many aspects of her work that are transfixing — a combination of personal narrative, a larger cultural understanding and something trans-Atlantic,” “It is about generational families, it’s about migration, it’s about moving from Africa to the U.S. and looking back always toward Africa, straddling both continents.
The artist, who favors rainbow crocs and has an open-throated laugh, makes lists of what she wants in one of her paintings before she begins. In one recent work, for example, she knew that she wanted bars on the window akin to those she recalled from her childhood home in Nigeria, her wedding dress and an illustration from one of her elementary school textbooks.
Pieces turn up in her paintings that are immediately recognizable to fellow Nigerians: a “Senator suit,” cabin biscuits, jerrycans, painted tea kettles, braided hairstyles, clonette dolls. She uses items that nod to vestiges of the British Empire, American pop culture, Roman Catholicism.
Njideka’s objects have this specificity that tells stories of place and time. And that is why she likes doing “still life”.

She also took her time choosing a U.S. gallery, which she finally did in 2018, having been represented by Victoria Miro in London since 2014.

 The artist, who won a MacArthur “genius” award in 2017, is a significant score for Zwirner. Her work is already held by major institutions including the Met, the Tate and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and her prices reached more than $4.7 million at auction last fall.

The critic and curator Hilton Als put Njideka in his series at the Huntington, which runs through June 12, and her work is currently featured at the Sydney Modern Project in Australia.
 Several pieces in the Zwirner show were recently included in the artist’s 2022 solo exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin. And one painting, “Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and…)” (2021), served as the basis for a wallcovering commissioned by the Met that is now on view as part of that museum’s installation, “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room.”

Just to mention a few, In 2015, Jamillah James, a former Studio Museum in Harlem curator and at the time, assistant curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, organized Akunyili Crosby’s first solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum. That same year, James organized another exhibition of Akunyili Crosby’s work at Art and Practice in Los Angeles.

 In 2016, Akunyili Crosby was named one of the Financial Times Women of the Year.” That same year, a solo exhibition of Akunyili Crosby’s work was held at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Akunyili-Crosby won the MacArthur Fellowship Genius grant in 2017.

In 2018, she designed the mural that wrapped the Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Avenue, Los Angeles. The mural features her signature style of combining painting with collage, printmaking, and drawing to create intricate, layered scenes. She was the second artist to create a mural for the site under a new initiative by the museum.

Dora Akunyili’s Daughter Showcases Artworks in Los Angeles Tuesday

Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, a Nigerian-American artist and the second daughter of late Prof. Dora Akunyili, is set to showcase the collections of her paintings at a new exhibition — inaugurating David Zwirner’s first Los Angeles gallery Tuesday, May 23rd.

The event which is billed to be like a significant art world, would talk about the lengths to which she’ll go in researching the scientific classification of plants to depict in one of her paintings — Madagascar Jasmine and Safari Sunset.

In a recent conversation at her East Los Angeles studio, discussing the process behind the self-portrait, “Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens,” which features her in patterned pants, holding her youngest child on the porch surrounded by lush greenery. She said she had a clear idea of what she wanted the plant to do.
Crosby, 40, continued: “There was a certain amount of obscuring that had to happen. You can’t obscure the pants so much that you’re just seeing little pieces of it. Some plants are very dense. You had to see enough of the pants to make sense of it. But the plants also couldn’t be so thin that it just didn’t work.”
 
She spent hours looking through pictures of flora and fauna from Nigeria and L.A., spending time in a plant store and visiting the Huntington art museum’s expansive botanical gardens, where she walked around all day “looking for a very particular leaf.”
 
“Normally I would have said, it takes me about three months to do a work, but it’s slowly been extending into longer. I’ve slowed down to get what I need. I always thought of my studio as a lab. I want to just go in there and cook and figure out what’s going on and make the pieces that are in my mind,” she said.
Njideka continued: “Something I’ve been very clear about with everybody I work with is, my pace is slow and you cannot push me or force me to work faster. I am not a machine; I like taking my time. Because for me, my interest in the work is pretty much diminished after the work is done. I never want to feel like I am just plowing through.”
Commending her works, David Zwirner, a German art dealer and the owner of David Zwirner gallery in New York City, London, Hong Kong, and Paris said that Njideka’s work in the exhibition “Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again”, which includes new and recent paintings in the East Hollywood space designed by Selldorf Architects, was well worth waiting for. We have to begin to understand this Nigerian artist’s slow and exacting approach, as well as why her new exhibition, inaugurating.
“She has been able to create a new vernacular and a new iconography in contemporary visual culture. She brought to the art world her own language,” he said.
“That language includes a mix of drawing, painting, collage and printmaking. Crosby’s work evokes scrapbooks or patchwork quilts that synthesize her Nigerian and American cultures through layers of visual signifiers, historical references and personal memories”
“Look closely at a Crosby painting and one continues to discover pieces of her past. Printed fabrics, articles of furniture or fashion, family members, book titles, architectural elements,” said Zwirner.
 
In a short remarks, Ian Alteveer, the Met’s curator of modern and contemporary art said there are so many aspects of her work that are transfixing — a combination of personal narrative, a larger cultural understanding and something trans-Atlantic,” “It is about generational families, it’s about migration, it’s about moving from Africa to the U.S. and looking back always toward Africa, straddling both continents.
The artist, who favors rainbow crocs and has an open-throated laugh, makes lists of what she wants in one of her paintings before she begins. In one recent work, for example, she knew that she wanted bars on the window akin to those she recalled from her childhood home in Nigeria, her wedding dress and an illustration from one of her elementary school textbooks.
Pieces turn up in her paintings that are immediately recognizable to fellow Nigerians: a “Senator suit,” cabin biscuits, jerrycans, painted tea kettles, braided hairstyles, clonette dolls. She uses items that nod to vestiges of the British Empire, American pop culture, Roman Catholicism.
Njideka’s objects have this specificity that tells stories of place and time. And that is why she likes doing “still life”.

She also took her time choosing a U.S. gallery, which she finally did in 2018, having been represented by Victoria Miro in London since 2014.

 The artist, who won a MacArthur “genius” award in 2017, is a significant score for Zwirner. Her work is already held by major institutions including the Met, the Tate and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and her prices reached more than $4.7 million at auction last fall.

The critic and curator Hilton Als put Njideka in his series at the Huntington, which runs through June 12, and her work is currently featured at the Sydney Modern Project in Australia.
 Several pieces in the Zwirner show were recently included in the artist’s 2022 solo exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin. And one painting, “Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and…)” (2021), served as the basis for a wallcovering commissioned by the Met that is now on view as part of that museum’s installation, “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room.”

Just to mention a few, In 2015, Jamillah James, a former Studio Museum in Harlem curator and at the time, assistant curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, organized Akunyili Crosby’s first solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum. That same year, James organized another exhibition of Akunyili Crosby’s work at Art and Practice in Los Angeles.

 In 2016, Akunyili Crosby was named one of the Financial Times Women of the Year.” That same year, a solo exhibition of Akunyili Crosby’s work was held at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Akunyili-Crosby won the MacArthur Fellowship Genius grant in 2017.

In 2018, she designed the mural that wrapped the Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Avenue, Los Angeles. The mural features her signature style of combining painting with collage, printmaking, and drawing to create intricate, layered scenes. She was the second artist to create a mural for the site under a new initiative by the museum.