As spring approaches, it’s a wonderful time to walk about Huntington’s Botanical Gardens. You should also check out the fascinating exhibition that I saw at The Met: Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts.
And starting today, Huntington’s Art Museum will display a selection of five works by Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby through June 12, 2023. This is the third and final exhibition in a series curated by the amazing Hilton Als, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, theater critic for The New Yorker magazine, and curator. One of America’s most creative and distinguished critics, Als has also been named the inaugural Hannah and Russel Kully Distinguished Fellow in the History of American Art.
As a fellow, Als will research, conceive, and develop an exhibition and public programs that will draw on The Huntington’s art, history, literary, and botanical collections. The fellowship runs the course of calendar year 2023, with potential future projects to be realized in later years, and it will be offered on an annual basis. This fellowship continues Als’ relationship with The Huntington beyond “The Hilton Als Series,” a trio of British contemporary art exhibitions that he curated in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art and exhibiting artists Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (2020), Celia Paul (2019), and now Akunyili Crosby. whose exhibition originated at Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), where it was on view Sept. 22, 2022, through Jan. 22, 2023.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “The Beautyful Ones” Series #1c, 2014.Acrylic, transfers, and colored pencil on paper. 60×42 in. (152.4× 106.7 cm).©Njideka Akunyili Crosby.Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.
For the current exhibition, Als and Akunyili Crosby selected collage-based paintings from The Beautyful Ones, the artist’s ongoing series of intimate portraits of Nigerian children, including members of her own family. The title references a classic 1968 novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, by Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah. Published in a year of worldwide social unrest, Armah’s book comments on the challenges of revolution, addresses the unfulfilled political promises of the postcolonial African nation-state, and looks ahead from a place of lost hope.
“Placing her work in the Huntington Art Gallery, in conversation with our signature collection of historic British portraits, invites visitors to view portraiture across time anew, and to consider more carefully their own responses to representations of both historical figures and contemporary personalities,” said Art Museum Director Christina Nielsen.
Akunyili Crosby creates unique settings for her subjects, where history, philosophy, and fantasy permeate the walls of quiet living spaces. Furnished with vintage decor and analog electronics, the interiors evoke her own 1980s-era youth.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “The Beautyful Ones” Series #4, 2015.Acrylic, photographic transfers, and colored pencil on paper. 60×42 in. (152.4× 106.7 cm).©Njideka Akunyili Crosby.Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.
“The Beautyful Ones series is framed by vulnerability, hope, and a certain self-awareness,” Als said. “Akunyili Crosby’s subjects ask, ‘How am I being read? How would you like to read me? Am I part of this world, or am I aspiring to the next?’ Throughout her career, she continues to delve into the diasporic experience to communicate various ideas about the meaning to be found in being an outsider and in belonging.”
Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983) is a leading contemporary artist whose work offers critical perspectives on postcolonial history and experience as well as transnational identities. Born and raised in Nigeria, she came to the United States in 1999 to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Swarthmore College, before obtaining a master’s in fine arts from Yale University. Akunyili Crosby’s work has been the subject of acclaimed solo exhibitions in both the United States and the United Kingdom, notably at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the National Portrait Gallery, London. In 2017, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant.”
