Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
September 2019
To celebrate the release of a new monograph published by Victoria Miro about Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s ongoing series of works titled The Beautyful Ones, the artist will be in conversation with writer Siddhartha Mitter, who has contributed an essay to the book. The event is co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem, and will be followed by a book signing.
Sunday, September 8, 3 PM
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1983 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist was recently awarded an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College in May 2019. She is also the recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship and has received a number of awards and grants, including the Prix Canson, 2016; Next Generation honor, New Museum, 2015; Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, 2015; and the James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2014, among others. She was an Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2011–2012.
Akunyili Crosby’s experience of syncretic cultures in both Nigeria and the United States informs the subject matter of her artworks. She was born in Nigeria and, at sixteen, immigrated to the US, where she has lived since. Akunyili Crosby draws from literary sources and personal narratives and extrapolates from her training in Western representational painting to invent a visual language capable of representing contemporary transcultural experiences.