Tea Time in New Haven, Enugu

A window into a domestic world at once imaginary and acutely real, Tea Time in New Haven, Enugu (2013) by Njideka Akunyili Crosby reflects the profound visual and emotional complexity of the artist’s multimedia practice – the result is a beautiful, radical synthesis of virtuosic figurative painting and collaged transfers of found images that the artist uses to explore the nature of hybridised and globalised identity in the twenty-first century. The vast, life-size frame opening onto a dining room carefully prepared for tea, Akunyili Crosby’s crisply lucid, graphical style affords the scene an immaculate realism, immersing us in the world of the painting. As the artist records the visual minutiae of everyday family life – assiduously detailing the branding of food packaging and the reflective glint of the dining table – the painting feels almost like a still life. Yet despite this, it maintains an understated theatricality. Narrative emerges from the feeling of human presence, implied not only by the laid table awaiting its guests, but the tapestries of images that block out fields of the painting: the back wall, the chairs and placemats, and the shadows cast onto the floor. These Rauschenberg-like collages of images seem to incarnate memory itself on the surfaces of the room: taking clippings from old Nigerian magazines, as well as her collection of family photos, Akunyili Crosby’s transfers of these photographs seem to fill the space with a sense of personal and cultural history, each image a building block of identity.

Accessing this generic space halfway between still life and portraiture is central to Akunyili Crosby’s project: the objects and images that fill the work serve as vessels of cultural meaning, and as they accumulate in the painting, they build up a multi-layered palimpsest of identity. Here, for example, the homely interior design and glistening furniture seem to epitomise Middle America, yet the table is laid with typical West African foods like Will of God Special Bread and Oxford Sweetened Cabin Biscuits. The art on the walls seems to embody this duality: ethnographic African designs are framed and exhibited, becoming part of a decorative Western aesthetic. All of this is reflected in the title of the work: New Haven is both a residential district in Akunyili Crosby’s hometown of Enugu, and the Connecticut city in which her alma mater Yale University is located.

Indeed, autobiography is an inescapable aspect of Akunyili Crosby’s work; it is her own personal experiences that she uses in order to investigate these questions of cultural cross-pollination: ‘I think there are more and more people in life, as people are moving around for various reasons, who live in simultaneous spaces at the same time. And with the work, I’m trying to get to that – this feeling of multiple spaces that exist together, and you kind of slip in and out from one to the other. It’s about talking of people who live, or inhabit, liminal spaces, and the liminal space I’m using is one that I know – because I’ve experienced it – which is my life’ (N. A. Crosby, https:// www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/njideka-akunyili-crosby-tateshots [accessed 10 April 2017]). In this empty room that is at once so full of life, perhaps the missing figure in this portrait is the artist herself.