See Njideka Akunyili Crosby's works on view at Whitney Museum

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, a US-based Nigerian visual artiste, recently displayed her works at the Whitney Museum in the USA. The Los Angeles-based artist makes large-scale, representational work that combines collage, drawing, painting, and printmaking.

Her works routinely fuses both Nigerian and American influences and source material, reflecting on contemporary African life (often her family) along with her experience as an expatriate living in the U.S., and the inherent difficulty of navigating these two realms. The works simultaneously become intimate while more broadly exploring the cultural complications of the dual worlds that she inhabits.

Her new work for the billboard on the façade of 95 Horatio Street, Before Now After (Mama, Mummy and Mamma), continues the artist’s ongoing exploration of her relationship to her family, and in this case to her sister, mother, and grandmother specifically.

In this new body of work, Crosby explores intimacy and interiority in her depictions of domestic life.

The Beautyful Ones is the artist’s first exhibition in Los Angeles.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby received her BA from Swarthmore College (2004) and her MFA from Yale University School of Art (2011). She participated in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artists-in-Residence program in 2011–12. In 2014 she received the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize.

Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, in January 2016.