Njideka Akunyili Crosby
b. 1983American (Nigerian-born) · African Contemporary Art 1990–present
Her paintings look, from across a room, like large domestic interiors. Up close, the surfaces of the figures and furniture turn out to be composed of hundreds of transferred photographic images.
Formation
Born in Nigeria, she moved to the United States at sixteen and trained at Swarthmore, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Yale. Her work draws on both Nigerian and American visual environments simultaneously, and the source imagery — family photographs, Nigerian popular magazines, portrait studio pictures, advertising — is specific rather than generic. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.
Technique
Acetone transfer combined with painting and collage on paper. She prints photographic images onto paper using a photocopier or laser printer, then transfers the ink onto the support with acetone and pressure, producing a slightly degraded, ghostly image embedded in the surface rather than sitting on it. These transfers are used as the pattern within figures and objects, so that a dress or a skin surface is composed of many small pictures. Around and over them she works in acrylic, coloured pencil, charcoal and pastel, and the different media are kept legible rather than unified.
The palette
Warm, domestic and locally specific. Ochres, browns, deep greens and terracotta in the interiors, with the transferred passages introducing the full colour range of printed photographs — which is a different kind of colour, mechanical and reproduced, sitting alongside hand-applied pigment. That distinction between painted colour and printed colour is doing conceptual work as well as visual: two image cultures in one surface.
Legacy
Her work is central to current discussion about diasporic identity in painting and about the domestic interior as a site of cultural negotiation. Technically, the integration of photographic transfer into a large-scale painted composition has been widely taken up, and she is among the figurative painters whose approach has shaped how a younger generation handles source imagery.
Palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.
Pigments used: Viridian · Umber · Sienna · Cadmium red