Njideka Akunyili Crosby:
“The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived

On the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York, we’re pleased to present a limited edition screenprint published by Highpoint Editions in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Text excerpted from an essay by Jason Rosenfeld.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s new print, “The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived, represents her first foray into an area of artistic production that she has been circling and considering for some time. It is both a statement of continuity with the subject matter and style that has dominated her painted work for over a decade, and a novel departure in terms of process and materials.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, 2023. Photo by Bobby Rogers

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

"The Beautyful Ones" May Have Arrived, 2023

43-color screenprint on Rives BFK paper

36 1/2 x 46 inches (92.7 x 116.8 cm)
Edition of 60, 10 AP

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The design is related to an acrylics-and-transfer-on-paper painting from 2013 titled “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” Might Not Hold True For Much Longer, now in the collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. At five and a half by seven feet, it was the precursor to a series of works, each bearing a similar title in quotes, derived from the debut novel by Ayi Kwei Armah from 1968.

Armah was born in Ghana in 1939, and his book centers on the challenges in the life of a working-class man in the weeks leading up to the coup against Kwame Nkrumah’s government in 1966.

Installation view, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: “The Beautyful Ones,” National Portrait Gallery, London, 2018–2019. Photo by Mark Gulezian

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, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California, 2023

Akunyili Crosby’s continuing series, now encompassing eleven paintings, thus takes post colonial Africa as its starting point, and presents frontal portraits of youthful relatives, friends, and herself in intricate interiors and complex clothing.

But this initial image from 2013 is different from the rest in that the protagonist, the artist herself, is seen in profil perdu, and the viewer is left to imagine her state of mind. In both the present print and its painted inspiration, a woman sits on a rug next to a low table on which rests a variety of objects, including a kerosene lantern, bowls, and plates. There is a radiator to the left of her head, and a wall with a baseboard. She wears an Ankara dress and sports a distinctively threaded hairstyle.

Akunyili Crosby reviews reference images for her print at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, 2023. Photo by Bobby Rogers

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” Might Not Hold True For Much Longer, 2013 (detail)

The painting was produced in Akunyili Crosby’s signature method, through precise drawing, the use of acrylic paints, and via transferring images sourced from the internet or photographs that she has collected over many years and that serve as a kind of personal lexicon in her pictures.

Akunyili Crosby’s source images for “The Beautyful Ones” (May Have Arrived), 2023. Photo by Bobby Rogers

In adapting such a complex work for an autonomous print, Akunyili Crosby and master printer Cole Rogers of the Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis needed to be nimble in the process and rigorous in the determination of colors and textures.

The artist had been inspired by printmaking classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and then at Yale University, where she studied under Rochelle Feinstein, as well as by prints made by artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Julie Mehretu. Rogers had first seen Akunyili Crosby’s work in person in a solo show of five pictures titled I Still Face You at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis in 2013. The eventual collaboration has taken four years.

Akunyili Crosby at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, 2023. Photo by Bobby Rogers

An early proof of “The Beautyful Ones” (May Have Arrived). Photo by Bobby Rogers

In the print, Akunyili Crosby amplifies elements of the source image while adding new details, such as the gold hoop earring and the four inverted glasses on the table. She made both feet visible, including a big toe and heel, added a bit of the left arm, and turned the subject’s face to the right so that the slit of her eye and her high cheekbone can be seen. And she transformed the table from rectangular to circular to better harmonize with the round pooling of the dress on the rug, the table’s shadow, that earring, and the various round bowls and plates and lantern and glasses on the table. Most critically, she deleted the narrow threshold at the upper right and the continuation of the wall and baseboard, in favor of a suggestive void that begins mere inches from the sitter’s face.

In the final print, forty-five screens were used to print forty-three specially mixed colors. The appearance of depth is created through multiple transparent layers and a grayish whitewash in the areas that replicate the artist’s signature image-transfer technique. Photo by Bobby Rogers

The most complex element of the print is the sitter’s fabulous dress. This is in an Ankara style, employing traditional African designs or patterns in a wax-based process on cotton that is itself, of course, a kind of printing. Based on a dress from Boxing Kitten in Brooklyn, it is built of sections like puzzle pieces, a combination of many colors and various levels of transparency.

The wavy patterns of the dress are paralleled in the complex hairstyle, derived from images of threaded hair by Nigerian photographer J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (1930–2014), who began shooting these traditional looks in the 1960s.

The patterned dress is the most complex part of the image. Inspired by traditional African patterning in an Ankara style, it combines several colors and various levels of transparency.

In making the print, Akunyili Crosby changed details from the source imagery, including the addition of a gold hoop earring and the angle of the subject’s face (here turned more to the right, revealing the slit of her eye and high cheekbone).

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived, 2023 (detail)

As with so much of Akunyili Crosby’s work, there is an architectonic quality to the dress and hair, signaling an awareness of the modernist design that marked the landscape of post colonial Africa, especially the metropolitan Lagos of her youth. The artist’s works are often built on such design scaffolds; they combine with her beautiful drawing of faces and bodies and her challenging use of perspective to enliven the compositions and establish physical settings for the sitters’ mental musings.

In works such as “The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived, Akunyili Crosby instills a sense of inner life into her figures who are presented in domestic environs that meld the Nigeria of her youth and the America of her maturity, and that literally bear their histories and culture—printed onto the metal of the radiator, the wood of the baseboard and table, the broad seams of a dress.

These somewhat washed-out visual sparklings press back into the depicted image but simultaneously and animatedly burst forward into the mind, in the forms of the hopes and dreams of the young sitter, who stares out into a light manilla-hued void, enveloped by the past but expectant and embracing of the future.

—Jason Rosenfeld, 2023

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

Visit Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s solo exhibition Coming Back to See Through, Again, which includes two new works from the series The Beautyful Ones, on view at David Zwirner New York through October 28, 2023.

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Njideka Akunyili Crosby:“The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived

On the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York, we’re pleased to present a limited edition screenprint published by Highpoint Editions in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Text excerpted from an essay by Jason Rosenfeld.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby:
“The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived