Dwellers: Native One

Njideka Akunyili Crosbys Dwellers: Native One from 2019 is a collage of photographic transfers and acrylic paint with colored pencil and graphite on wove paper that exemplifies the Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artists approach to representing the experience of cultural hybridity through a combination of painting, drawing, and photographic transfer that creates surfaces of extraordinary visual density and personal significance. Crosby, who was born in Enugu, Nigeria, and moved to the United States at the age of sixteen, developed a technique of transferring photographs from Nigerian popular media, family albums, and fashion magazines onto the surface of her paintings, creating a palimpsest of personal and cultural memory in which the images of Nigerian life are literally embedded in the painted surface. The title Dwellers: Native One suggests a figure who is simultaneously at home and foreign, a native who dwells in a place that is both familiar and strange, and the techniques of collage and transfer that Crosby uses create a surface that embodies this duality by layering photographic images of Nigerian life over painted abstraction and vice versa. The year 2019 places this work in the period of Crosbys greatest public recognition, following her MacArthur Fellowship in 2017 and her solo exhibitions at the Norton Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Venice Biennale. The combination of photographic transfer, acrylic paint, colored pencil, and graphite creates a surface that is simultaneously a painting, a drawing, a photograph, and a collage, embodying in its very materials the cultural hybridity that is the subject of the work.

Crosbys paintings and collages have influenced the development of contemporary figurative art by demonstrating that the experience of cultural hybridity can be represented through innovative combinations of painting, drawing, and photographic transfer. Dwellers: Native One influenced the broader discourse on identity, diaspora, and cultural memory in contemporary art.

A 2019 collage by Crosby combining photographic transfers, acrylic paint, colored pencil, and graphite on wove paper, representing cultural hybridity through a surface that embeds photographs of Nigerian life within painted layers in a palimpsest of personal and cultural memory.