Name: Press Release
Start: 2023-09-14
End: 2023-10-28
Location: David Zwirner

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens, 2021 (detail)

In this exhibition—which debuted at our Los Angeles gallery in May—multiple places and temporalities exist together within single compositions. In these works, Akunyili Crosby uses doorways, screens, posters, and windows as devices that open to other worlds, such as private interior spaces, lush external gardens, and bustling Nigerian markets.

Reviewing the recent West Coast presentation in The New York Times, Robin Pogrebin wrote, “this Nigerian artist’s … new exhibition … feels like a significant art world event.”

Installation view, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2023

In Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens, for example, which shows the artist with her young child on the back porch of their home surrounded by plants and vines, a sliding door reveals a domestic interior space, hinting at the private world within. Inside, an image of Akunyili Crosby’s mother can be glimpsed, offering a powerful multigenerational representation of the tenderness, love, and beauty of motherhood.

The treatment of paint and the layering of the photographic transfers in this work create a tension between depth and surface that optically and narratively affect how the viewer visually navigates the composition. This work first appeared in Picturing Motherhood Now at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2021–2022, and was featured in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, in 2022.

Installation view, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, 2022

“The narrative component of the work, especially the memory of [her mother] and the artist’s own expectations about motherhood … combine to make … a vibrant, moving paean to family ties across oceans and time.”

—Ian Alteveer, chair of contemporary art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Installation view, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

Two new works from the artist’s series The Beautyful Ones, which Akunyili Crosby first began in 2012, are also on view. Several of the earlier works from this series were included in The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, an exhibition that debuted at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, in September 2022, and traveled to The Huntington in San Marino, California, in early 2023.

Installation view, The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2022–2023

Installation view, The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, 2023

The series takes its title from a popular Ghanaian novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah. As the artist explains, “[the book] was written in my parents’ generation, and it was about the hope that generation had about how things would change and be better after various West African countries became independent, but sadly that didn’t happen. In Nigeria, we just ended up having military dictator after military dictator, and corruption and everything just went down the drain. But there is this renaissance happening so I’m … claiming it for my generation, like the beautyful ones have arrived!”

Installation view, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: "The Beautyful Ones", National Portrait Gallery, London, 2018–2019

“Her paintings are unapologetically autobiographical.… But, as she says, you don’t need to know her or her country to understand her work.… She is well versed in historical western painting, and references to Édouard Manet, Édouard Vuillard, and Diego Velázquez abound in her work, as do those to the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi, whose interiors have a similar stillness and compositional precision to her own.”

—Jonathan Griffin, The Financial Times

Installation view, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

Several works in the exhibition—which were also included in the artist’s exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art—prominently feature vegetation and plant life. More than decorative motifs, plants—and their origins and migrations—have deep cultural and historical associations that naturally appeal to the artist. One of these works, Potential, Displaced, served as the basis for a wallcovering commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, that is currently on view as part of the ongoing installation Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room.

Installation view, Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and...) (2021), on view in Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ongoing

In a number of these works the flora also overlay screen walls of the type that adorn many residences built in the 1970s and early 1980s in Nigeria. Individually striking, the plants and screens also create unique visual and formal lattices for Akunyili Crosby’s complex organization of imagery and space. Alive with history and culture, these works are at once personal and individual, but also remain approachable and universal.

Installation view, Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and...) (2021), on view in Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ongoing

The exhibition also features Blend in - Stand out, which Akunyili Crosby created for a major 2019–2020 group exhibition at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Here, a seated male figure's face is blocked by a woman who leans over, embracing him. Her face is turned away and likewise obscured, highlighting the private, personal nature of the scene. The two appear in a dining room with an ornate pot filled with flowers on the table.

Installation view, Interiorities: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Leonor Antunes, Henrike Naumann, Adriana Varejão, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2019–2022. Photo by Connolly Weber Photography

“The large work, made on paper with acrylic paint, color pencil, charcoal, and photograph transfers, attached to the wall with binder clips, is so well composed as to convey a real, autonomous space. Yet, as a viewer, I find myself looking for what is familiar and what is unknown, recognizing and misrecognizing, and finding something of my own.”

—Malik Gaines, writer, artist, and professor

Installation view, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

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