Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby (born 1983) is a Nigerian-born visual artist working in Los Angeles, California. Akunyili Crosby's art "negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria, creating collage and photo transfer-based paintings that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/njideka-akunyili-crosby-18974

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Njideka Akunyili Crosby – Inhabiting Multiple Spaces | Artist Interview | TateShots

Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeYP8ssD_BM

Notes from the video:

- She thinks of herself as a woman, an Igbo woman, a Nigerian, African, a person of colour, an artist.

- The layers she adds to how she identifies herself changes over time. it broadens as she moves further out into the world.

- The figures in her work are based on her family and her life. Her husband shows up in her work a lot. Her siblings have shown up in a series. She has been doing a combination of plants she found in Los Angeles and plants that she found in Nigeria. She creates a garden that is nonsensical.

- She has a bag of portrait fabrics that she has collected for years. These fabrics are very precious to her.

- She tries to create multifaceted characters, so she might have a hairstyle that speaks to very rural life but then be wearing a dress that speaks to cosmopolitan life. She could be in a setting that speaks to high modern architecture, but also have an old TV playing Nigerian news from the 80s.

- Her pieces cant be put into a clearly defined box because it doesn't exist.

- She likes to layer pieces on top of each other. Her brain feels on high alert when she paints, she is thinking about how to resolve a work as well as making decisions about where to draw and paint, what materials to use. This is what I love most about traditional art and painting.

"with each move you make with a painting, the equation is always changing."

- She thinks that more and more people in life, as people are moving around for various reasons, who live in simultaneous spaces at the same time. She wants her work to have this feeling of being able to slip out of one place and into another. I really like this idea. Adding newspaper clippings into my piece could help to show context about the time the piece was made and show what was happening in the world at the time the work was made.

I chose to include Njideka's work in my research after just stumbling across her work on the Tate website. She uses images and photo transfer amongst other techniques to layer images in her pieces. This reminded me a lot of the effect I want to create using newspapers. I decided to look more into photo transfer after looking at her work to see if this technique could work in my piece.

Acetone Transfer:

Acetone laser jet print transfer is a quick way to copy a project from a photo or a computer to the stone. Toner transfer with acetone allows for almost 100% transfer of the image from a print to the stone and convert it to a printing matrix. The transfer can be used on its own or can be combined with other techniques. Not all images are suitable for such a transfer. Delicate tones in the dark, dense parts of the image may disappear. Dark, large, flat areas may not transfer at all, or transfer, but break off together with the transfer paper. The drawing, illustration or the photo should be contrasted.

Field Notes Research

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