The Nigerian-born, LA-based artist talks about heritage, identity and why she chose art over medicine
Pushing through the shop-front door of her east Los Angeles studio, laden with bags and 10 minutes late, Njideka Akunyili Crosby apologises that she has not had time to tidy up. She has a lot on her plate. Wearing large tortoise-shell glasses and with a yellow and purple scarf wrapped around her head, despite her apparent fluster she is a graceful figure, especially given that she is eight months pregnant.
It’s been a memorable year for the 33-year-old Nigerian-born artist. In June she was awarded the Prix Canson, an international prize for works on paper, and in November she was shortlisted for the 2017 Future Generation Art Prize, worth $100,000. That same month, her 2012 painting “Drown” sold at Sotheby’s for just under $1.1m, more than five times its estimate.
In all fairness, 2015, in which she was awarded the New Museum’s Next Generation Prize in New York among other grants and accolades, was also a good year. But 2016 has been exceptional, she says, because of the increased visibility that exhibitions around the world have afforded her work. Visibility, she tells me, for an immigrant such as herself who does not see her story reflected in mainstream cultural narratives, is everything.