Njideka Akunyili Crosby

In lieu of the suspended live Speaker Series presentation, we’ve captured a conversation between artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Christina Olsen, Director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA): watch the video below.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, a 2017 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, is a Nigerian-born visual artist working in Los Angeles. Crosby uses collage and photo transfer-based paintings to expose and explore moments of collision, moments of unity, and moments of hybridity found in cross-cultural relationships and in cultures of colonization. Crosby’s work is both personal and universal, as she draws upon her lived experience with interracial marriage, immigration, and dual ideas of home, and the deep traces of colonization in Nigeria. In 2019, Crosby was a participant in the Venice Biennale 58^th International Art Exhibition, May You Live in Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff. Recent solo exhibitions include Njideka Akunyili Crosby: The Beautyful Ones at the National Portrait Gallery in London and Counterparts, which debuted at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2017 before traveling to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, in 2018. She received an honorary doctorate of art from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 2019 and was named among the Financial Times’ ​“Women of the Year” in 2016.

Supported by University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA).