Deep dive into the world of internationally-acclaimed artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby as she joins in conversation with PAMM Director Franklin Sirmans.

Akunyili Crosby will detail how she draws on art-historical, political, and personal references to make luminous, densely layered figurative compositions whose intricate surfaces combine disparate materials and aesthetic traditions.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. One of the most distinctive voices of her generation, Akunyili Crosby draws on art-historical, political, and personal references to make luminous, densely layered figurative compositions whose intricate surfaces combine disparate materials and aesthetic traditions. An amalgam of processes including painting, drawing, and photo-transfer techniques are harnessed in works that, precise in style, conjure the complexity of contemporary diasporic experience.

Akunyili Crosby has exhibited at venues including the Royal Academy, London; Haus der Kunst, Munich; the National Portrait Gallery, London; MCA Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; Baltimore Museum of Art; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the New Museum, New York; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Studio Museum, Harlem, amongst others. In 2019, her work was included in May You Live In Interesting Times, La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Ralph Rugoff, and in 2017, in Prospect 4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, New Orleans, Louisiana. Akunyili Crosby is the recipient of a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship and a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship.