Njideka Akunyili Crosby begins every piece by identifying her viewer’s place within it. Are they peering at the scene as if through a window? Are they so close to her figures that they’re tempted to sit down beside them?
It’s this ability to conjure intimacy from all angles that makes the Nigerian artist’s collaged paintings so transfixing. Akunyili Crosby, now 41, was just a teenager when she left Lagos for the U.S. After completing an MFA at Yale and a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, she carved out a place for herself in the art world with works that filter the dense matter of geopolitics and diaspora through the prism of the quotidian. By assembling images plucked from Nigerian magazines, newspapers, and her own life, the artist depicts unguarded moments between people—sprawled on the living room floor or slouched at the kitchen table—as the full might of their sociocultural context roars around them.