By Jeffrey Day, UC Davis News

"Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose art negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in the United States and her native Nigeria through collage and photo transfer-based paintings, will give the seventh annual Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture at University of California, Davis, on Nov. 12 at 4:30 p.m.

This year’s online free lecture celebrates art Professor Emeritus Wayne Thiebaud’s 100th birthday on Nov. 16. Click here for more information and to register.

Akunyili Crosby is a recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship; a 2020 Carnegie Corporation “Great Immigrant, Great American” Award; a Financial Times’ 2016 Women of the Year award; and a 2019 African Art Award.

Drawing on political, personal and art historical references, Akunyili Crosby creates densely layered, figurative compositions focused on interiors and everyday scenes that reflect the complexity of contemporary experience, her own cross-cultural experiences and Nigeria’s thorny history. The artworks showing families watching television, friends socializing, couples sharing intimate moments, or lone figures lost in thought are constructed of family portraits, snapshots and images from Nigerian movies, advertisements and history.

“I’m mining my life to tell a story that is global,” she said in an interview with the MacArthur Foundation.

Akunyili Crosby has had recent solo exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Baltimore Museum of Art. She also has participated in La Biennale di Venezia and in exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. Artworks by Akunyili Crosby are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art,  Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum in Harlem and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art." 

Read the full story at the UC Davis News website.