Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Nigeria, Los Angeles
I Still Face You
2015
Acrylic, charcoal, color pencils, collage, and transfers on paper.
Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro, London.
I Still Face You shows the complex reality of the African diaspora as well as Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s own reality. It appears in The Beautyful Ones (2015), an exhibition focusing solely on Njideka Akunyili Crosby, where she reflects on her Nigerian heritage and traditions, contemporary postcolonial African cosmopolitanism, and her experiences in the United States. (Art and Practice Organization 2015: I Still Face You). Crosby’s use of mixed media directly reflects her experiences in the US and Nigeria. Her work “conjures the complexity of contemporary experience,” by mixing Nigerian images and snippets with forms of arrangement that she takes from her training in Western art. (Victoria Miro 2015: Njideka Akunyili Crosby). Her integration of these separate influences combats the generalization of Africa as a static place, a perpetual victim of colonization and therefore stuck in time. By creating these complicated images, Crosby asserts the validity of her own intersectional existence, forcing viewers to confront the stereotypes they may carry about Africa, Nigeria, and the kinds of experiences that people can have.
https://www.artandpractice.org/exhibitions/njideka-akunyili-crosby-the-beautyful-ones-and-two-films-by-akosua-adoma-owusu/
http://www.njidekaakunyilicrosby.com/work/i-still-face-you
https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/185-njideka-akunyili-crosby/
