Art South Africa — Young Nigerian artist, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, becomes the 11th person to win the 2014 Smithsonian American Art Museum‘s James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize.
Akunyili Crosby has also been selected for the New Museum Triennial, Surround Audience, curated by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin opening in New York on 25 February and continuing through 24 May 2015.
Informed by art historical and literary sources, Akunyili Crosby’s complex, multi-layered works reflect contemporary transcultural identity. Combining drawing, painting and collage on paper, Akunyili Crosby’s large-scale figurative compositions are drawn from the artist’s memories and experiences. She uses the visual language and inherited traditions of classical academic western painting, particularly the portrait and still life. Akunyili Crosby’s characters and scenes, however, occupy the liminal, in-between zone that post-colonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha refers to as ‘the third space’, a point of overlap, conflation and mixing of cultural influences specific to diaspora communities.

Her work is in the collections of major museums including Yale University Art Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and Tate. Akunyili Crosby currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She has most recently participated in Draped Down at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and Sound Vision at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.