Where cultures overlap

On Level 5 of the AGO, a large-scale work on paper by Njideka Akunyili Crosby welcomes visitors to I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces, alongside home movies from the Prelinger Archives and clips from Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). Akunyili Crosby’s work Blend In – Stand Out (2019) centres on two figures in an abstracted domestic setting, their backs turned towards the viewer. The standing figure, the artist, is leaning over, embracing the seated figure of her husband. It’s a loving scene many can resonate with, and yet, it’s highly specific to the artist’s hybrid existence. Look closely beyond the painterly elements and you will see images lifted from Nigerian pop culture – magazine cutouts and other photographs – carefully layered into the surroundings and into the figure of the artist. Saying of her works in 2017, Akunyili Crosby explained, “It’s like a faint, faded memory of a place I used to know, a place I used to live in.” These works exist where cultures converge and overlap in the African diaspora: post-colonial, immigrant spaces. 

Akunyili Crosby’s works are deeply autobiographical in that they are shaped by her dual identity as a cosmopolitan Nigerian woman living in the US married to a white American man. One of six children, she was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983; her father was a surgeon and her mother was a highly regarded pharmacologist.  At 16, she immigrated to the United States through a Green Card lottery, and she went on to study at Swarthmore College, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Yale University. Her profile as a contemporary artist has risen remarkably in the years since then with solo and group exhibitions, and numerous accolades including a recent 2021 United States Artists Fellowship and a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship. Influenced by artists Kerry James Marshall and Wangechi Mutu and novelist Chinua Achebe, her mixed media works are crafted using photographic transfers, collage, drawing and painting. She offers up vignettes drawn from her everyday life informed by both cultures, with her husband, family and friends as reoccurring characters. The works featuring her husband in particular offer complex personal reflections of what it's like when a Nigerian woman marries outside of her culture. “I work from my experiences of growing up in Nigeria and then immigrating to the US in my late teens,” explained Akunyili Crosby in 2020, “since the [US presidential] election in 2016, I’ve been grappling with my role as an artist... Some make works that hold up a mirror to the rot (systemic racism, sexism, etc.) in society; some create works that affirm underrepresented experiences, that let you know you are not alone; some create magical moments and experiences that allow us to escape the exhaustion of daily life. I saw my role as creating works that centred a Black-immigrant experience, making people who had any overlap with those I depicted feel seen.” 

I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces is on view through August 2022. For more on the exhibition, read this story featuring consulting curator Rick Prelinger and this story about Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016). AGO visitors can also check out paintings by another Nigerian-born artist, Emmanuel Osahor, on Level 4.