Njideka Akunyili Crosby

(b. 1983, Nigeria)

Njideka Akunyili Crosby lives in Los Angeles. Drawing on art historical, political and personal references, Njideka Akunyili Crosby creates densely layered figurative compositions that, precise in style, nonetheless conjure the complexity of contemporary experience. In 1999 she moved to the United States, where she now lives. Her cultural identity combines strong attachments to the country of her birth and to her adopted home, a hybrid identity that is reflected in her work. She was awarded Foreign Policy's Leading 100 Global Thinkers of 2015 alongside the Next Generation Prize, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Recent solo exhibitions include I Refuse to be Invisible, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (2016) and The Beautiful Ones, Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2015), staged concurrently with a solo presentation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015). Her work is in the collections of major museums including Yale University Art Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Tate, The Norton Museum of Art, Zeitz MOCAA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.