.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Composed of a rich array of intricately cut clippings from Nigerian magazines and the artist’s own archive of photographs which she transferred onto the surface of the canvas, the surface of Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s paintings are a glittering, kaleidoscopic display of pattern and texture. In Harmattan Haze–a name that derives from the dry, dusty wind that sweeps in from the Nigerian desert–a couple exchanges a loving glance at the kitchen table. Behind them, a window opens onto a cityscape with a water tower and smokestack, colored a dusky pink that evokes the haze of the painting’s title. The woman’s dress and the husband’s skin, as well as the rug on the floor, are all painstakingly collaged from materials that include drawings in pencil and charcoal, but also xeroxed transfers, in a virtuoso masterpiece of artistic techniques. Akunyili Crosby often “portray[s] sensual moments between a loving couple,” and as Jean-Philipe Dedieu validated when profiling Akunyili Crosby’s work for the New Yorker, these works are “perhaps the most striking” (J. Dedieu, “Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Intimate Universes,” The New Yorker, November 5, 2015). As is the case here, Akunyili Crosby often uses herself and her husband as models for her paintings.
With her image of domestic bliss and collage-based constructions, Akunyili Crosby updates the consumer critic of British Pop icon Richard Hamilton’s collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? In this iconic work from 1956, Hamilton uses the collage to describe and critique the consumerism and abundance of the Post World War II era. In Hamilton’s collage, a man and a woman–clipped from health and beauty magazines–show off the accouterments of their success as well as their well-toned and groomed bodies. Hamilton explained his intention of “attempt[ing] to summarize the various influences that were beginning to shape post-war Britain. We seemed to be taking a course towards a rosy future and our changing, Hi-Tech, world was embraced with a starry-eyed confidence; a surge of optimism which took us into the 1960s” (R. Hamilton, quoted in Exteriors, Interiors, Objects, People, Stuttgart : Edition Hansjorg Mayer, 1990, p.44.) Instead of forward-looking into the future promised by technology, Akunyili Crosby instead appears to look backwards from the future Hamilton imaged in the 1950s to that past. Harmattan Haze emphasizes a loving union, substituting Hamilton’s critique with a wistful lyricism that infuses the lifestyle pages from Better Homes and Gardens with the perspective of diaspora, looking for the “moments when her Nigerianness and her Americanness collide” (N. Akunyili Crosby, “Njideka Akunyili Crosby on painting cultural collision,” video, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, https://www.sfmoma.org [Accessed April 8, 2017]).
Critics have identified a wide variety of sources in her work including, “…classic and contemporary painters–Édouard Vuillard, Alex Katz, Chris Ofili.” But her work is also very much indebted to photography—not just to fine-art photographers like J. D. Okhai Ojeikere and Malick Sidibé but to the vernacular imagery of her home country. Every time she returns from Nigeria, she brings back hundreds of photos she has taken with her own camera, from family portraits to snapshots from the pages of popular Nigerian life-style magazines. These photos, gathered over multiple journeys to the Continent, are layered in her works by collage and acetone-transfer prints, creating a fabric of images throughout her paintings. A close look at her works reveals the recurrence of three pictures in particular: a headshot of the popular Nollywood actress Genevieve Nnaji, whose swept-back afro gives her the look of a Blaxploitation heroine; a portrait of the singer and televangelist Chris Okotie, whose red jacket evokes Michael Jackson’s in “Thriller”; and a row of Nigerian lawyers wearing solemn white wigs, a visual vestige of British colonial presence. Such images reflect Akunyili Crosby’s notion of Nigeria as a “contact and confluence zone”–a site of continuous cultural transfers with the United States and Britain. “My work is based on my autobiography,” she told Jean-Philipe Dedieu. “And I feel like my journey has created a character or person who doesn’t fit in any box” (Ibid.).
With her image of domestic bliss and collage-based constructions, Akunyili Crosby updates the consumer critic of British Pop icon Richard Hamilton’s collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? In this iconic work from 1956, Hamilton uses the collage to describe and critique the consumerism and abundance of the Post World War II era. In Hamilton’s collage, a man and a woman–clipped from health and beauty magazines–show off the accouterments of their success as well as their well-toned and groomed bodies. Hamilton explained his intention of “attempt[ing] to summarize the various influences that were beginning to shape post-war Britain. We seemed to be taking a course towards a rosy future and our changing, Hi-Tech, world was embraced with a starry-eyed confidence; a surge of optimism which took us into the 1960s” (R. Hamilton, quoted in Exteriors, Interiors, Objects, People, Stuttgart : Edition Hansjorg Mayer, 1990, p.44.) Instead of forward-looking into the future promised by technology, Akunyili Crosby instead appears to look backwards from the future Hamilton imaged in the 1950s to that past. Harmattan Haze emphasizes a loving union, substituting Hamilton’s critique with a wistful lyricism that infuses the lifestyle pages from Better Homes and Gardens with the perspective of diaspora, looking for the “moments when her Nigerianness and her Americanness collide” (N. Akunyili Crosby, “Njideka Akunyili Crosby on painting cultural collision,” video, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, https://www.sfmoma.org [Accessed April 8, 2017]).
Critics have identified a wide variety of sources in her work including, “…classic and contemporary painters–Édouard Vuillard, Alex Katz, Chris Ofili.” But her work is also very much indebted to photography—not just to fine-art photographers like J. D. Okhai Ojeikere and Malick Sidibé but to the vernacular imagery of her home country. Every time she returns from Nigeria, she brings back hundreds of photos she has taken with her own camera, from family portraits to snapshots from the pages of popular Nigerian life-style magazines. These photos, gathered over multiple journeys to the Continent, are layered in her works by collage and acetone-transfer prints, creating a fabric of images throughout her paintings. A close look at her works reveals the recurrence of three pictures in particular: a headshot of the popular Nollywood actress Genevieve Nnaji, whose swept-back afro gives her the look of a Blaxploitation heroine; a portrait of the singer and televangelist Chris Okotie, whose red jacket evokes Michael Jackson’s in “Thriller”; and a row of Nigerian lawyers wearing solemn white wigs, a visual vestige of British colonial presence. Such images reflect Akunyili Crosby’s notion of Nigeria as a “contact and confluence zone”–a site of continuous cultural transfers with the United States and Britain. “My work is based on my autobiography,” she told Jean-Philipe Dedieu. “And I feel like my journey has created a character or person who doesn’t fit in any box” (Ibid.).