Exceptional Works: Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, "The Beautyful Ones" Series #6, 2018 (detail)

“Akunyili Crosby’s vibrant canvases are alive with, and to, her understanding of her various subjects’ layered, complex, and vulnerable lives.… Her paintings present a world that is literally layered, and deeply committed to the depth to be found on the surfaces that make up intimate and private spaces, including the body.”

—Hilton Als, The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

"The Beautyful Ones" Series #6, 2018

Acrylic, photographic transfers, and colored pencil on paper

59 3/4 x 42 1/2 inches (151.8 x 108 cm)

The present work is from the ongoing series The Beautyful Ones, an important body of work that Akunyili Crosby began in 2012. “The Beautyful Ones” Series #6 (2018), shows a young girl standing in what appears to be a classroom. Photo transfers are embedded across the many surfaces depicted, including on the floors, desks, window frames, and in the girl’s shoes. The piece is currently included in The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, an exhibition that debuted at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, in September 2022, and is now on view at The Huntington, San Marino, California.

Installation view, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: “The Beautyful Ones,” The National Portrait Gallery, London, 2018

In 2018, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: “The Beautyful Ones” traveled to London’s National Portrait Gallery, home to the world’s greatest collection of portraits. The presentation brought together new and existing works from the ongoing series, marking a prodigious milestone in Akunyili Crosby’s career.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, "The Beautyful Ones" Series #6, 2018 (detail)

As Als describes: “In her ongoing series The Beautyful Ones, artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby takes as her subject children she came across in family albums, or observed and photographed on trips to her native Nigeria. The paintings … are framed by vulnerability, hope, and a certain self-awareness. Inspired by the Ghanaian author Ayi Kweh Armah’s classic 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, which centers on political and personal idealism and corruption.”

Novel cover image, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah

“The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, morose and poetic, was quickly and deservedly enshrined as a classic of African literature. Akunyili Crosby first read it in secondary school, like so many others in English-speaking Africa, in the ubiquitous Heinemann African Writers Series paperback edition with the orange cover design. Her own series of ‘The Beautyful Ones’ reads as acknowledgment of the problem Armah posed, and as a quiet but assertive response—one of hope sprung eternal, and fresh belief.”

—Siddhartha Mitter, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: The Beautyful Ones

Akunyili Crosby discussing the present work, “The Beautiful Ones” Series #6, while in conversation with Courtney J. Martin, July 2021, as part of the Yale Center for British Art's At home: Artists in Conversation series

“As time went on, it became clear to me that the images [photographs] were a very important part of the work, even though I hadn’t given them a chance, because I had a very specific idea of what painting should be…. I just felt like painting wasn’t enough. If you think of it as vocabulary, I needed more words. I had reached the limits of what I could do with the vocabulary of painting.”

—Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “The Beautyful Ones” Series #1c, 2014 (left); Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Infant Baltasar Carlos, 1638-39 (right)

“Towards the end of my [residency] at the Studio Museum [in 2012], I decided I wanted to do a full-on portrait, just someone standing, looking straight at you, saying, ‘This is the history I have come from.’ It was time for me to stop running away from it because, at that point, I had been running away from it for two years.…... I wanted to do my own version of Velázquez.”

—Njideka Akunyili Crosby

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

Installation view, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: "The Beautyful Ones", Victoria Miro Venice, 8 May–13 July 2019.

“There are two ways I transfer.… For the little pictures, I have the photograph. I work with digital copies of it. If it's a hard-copy photograph, I scan it. So, I have massive files with all my pictures. I have one particular printer I use. Not all printers do this. Once my printer breaks down I'm kind of toast! I pick the photographs for each piece, print them out, and lay everything out on the floor. When I select an image to transfer I put it face down on the raw paper—it has to be on raw paper. I dip my brush in acetone and rub it behind the photograph and put a lot of pressure on it. The acetone breaks down whatever the binding is for the printed photograph and the rubbing pushes the released ink into my paper, which is really soft and absorbent.”

—Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s studio

“Akunyili Crosby sets herself constraints, then slips them.… The rules and the slippage operate in tandem; together they queer both the family and the national archive. She creates a new memory-script that floats across spaces and the fields of signs.”

—Siddhartha Mitter, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: The Beautyful Ones

Consign With David Zwirner