If you attended the Salon of 1865 in Paris you would remember Manet’s Olympia which caused quite a stir. You might also recall Alexandre Cabenal’s Birth of Venus if only because it strikes us now as such a dramatic riposte to the Manet. Yet despite its salacious rendering, it troubled no one. There was a lot of good painting in that Salon, but by the following year you would probably have forgotten most of what was in there. The same will be true of the 2019 Venice Biennale. I won’t soon forget the paintings of Njideka Akunyili Crosby—which were breathtakingly beautiful and genuinely new formally. She had a mini-retrospective in five large pictures in the central pavilion and then in the Arsenale, which tends to show the younger, more cutting edge work, she had a row of brand new (with one exception), astonishing little portrait heads in which she clearly took another big step both formally and conceptually.
Akunyili Crosby’s large paintings in the Giardini layer images from her Nigerian culture (where she lived until her late teens), the remnants of British culture (still evident in Nigeria today), and America (she went to Swarthmore College, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, and Yale, married a man from Texas, and lives in Los Angeles). Her work is very much about this collision and hybridization of cultures and we viscerally experience with her the dynamic fluidity and arbitrary layering that defines the complexity of the times we live in. The deliberate iconography and highly skilled transfers and rendering in these paintings recall de Kooning’s famous “slipping glimpses” of reality; he transferred images from newspapers as in his 1956 Easter Monday in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Akunyili Crosby explained that “I think of myself as a woman, an Ibo woman, a Nigerian, and African, a person of color, an artist, and the fascinating thing is that the layers I add to identify myself changes over time. It just keeps broadening as I move farther out into the world.”1 This too is part of what makes Akunyili Crosby’s work technically and iconographically new, and so much of our moment.