She was from the generation that never left the village and didn’t speak English. The tabletop with her photos was still as it was when she was alive.
I wanted to make a work about generations, so I went to the village where I used to spend summers with my grandmother. If there’s a musician who was really big in the ’80s, say Prince Nico Mbarga, who had the biggest Afro Highlife hit on the continent with “Sweet Mother,” then there’s 2face Idibia, who had the biggest hit several years ago with “African Queen.” If there’s a very famous writer, say Chinua Achebe, who’s of my parents’ generation, then I had to think of a writer from my generation for the other panel, which turned out to be Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. These things have been interwoven into an evolving space that is Nigeria. Then, starting in the late 1970s, the markers of cultural capital move from the United Kingdom to the United States. They gradually morph and the Nigerians adapt them to say what they want. The British people leave various traditions behind, and they don’t just stay put. On top of that, someone can wear a “traditional” wedding outfit, including a top hat, which comes from when Nigeria was a British colony, but now is part of the tradition of the Niger Delta, like lawyers wearing white wigs. The cultures from the various tribes merge there’s inter-tribal appropriation and borrowing. It’s partly to do with a question: What is tradition? In Nigeria, more than 200 tribes have been lumped together. In the case of Nigeria specifically, what does that hybrid space mean to you? How do you capture that visually?
#Diptic printmaking full#
Plus, I can spend three full days online trying to find one particular image, before the moment when I say, “Ha! I know this!” I look for those that showcase a hybrid space, and not just Nigeria-there are many such spaces, most obviously formerly colonized places. Or from friends’ Facebook pages, or family albums and popular album covers. Every time I go back to Nigeria I buy pictures from the photographer who shoots our family’s events-even if he thinks they’re not good. They come from magazine ads, fashion and lifestyle pictures. The found photographs, transferred onto the canvas, are common in your work, and prevalent throughout both panels here. I was a little bit scared, so doing it as a diptych was a way to give myself courage: What if one panel had the figure and one did not, so I didn’t feel like I was diving into the deep end? Here, I wanted to bring as much rigor to the space as to the figure. Up to that point, in paintings where the figure was very dominant, I wasn’t paying as much attention to the space. I wanted to paint an interior with no one in it. His was a very warm red, whereas I decided to use a cool pigment called quinacridone red.Īnd how did the painting come to be a diptych? This would be a challenge to myself: a painting dominated by one color. Its rich red palette, with lots of cadmium, was highly controlled, and I remember having that moment when you see something you want to use. Visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I saw a small Degas painting. In some ways the inspiration here was more about form than content. To start with formal questions, what led to the decisions to make this painting a diptych and to use such a distinctive palette for it? Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Predecessors, detail (2013). African viewers may be able to immediately decode the images, while they may require some elucidation for the average Western observer.
They contain images of popular Nigerian musicians and beauty queens, ads from fashion magazines, and photographs from family events to situate themes relating to tradition and newness, politics and culture, and urban and rural in buzzing tension. Her contemplative paintings are also the subject of two new solo museum exhibitions, at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York.Īkunyili Crosby’s paintings of herself, her family, and friends, often relaxing or embracing in their homes and other private spaces, explore cultural hybridity through a welter of references. Already on a dramatic career rise in the six years since Njideka Akunyili Crosby earned her MFA from Yale, the Nigerian-American painter shot into the cultural stratosphere on Tuesday when she was named a 2017 MacArthur fellow.
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