NIGERIAN BORN ARTIST AND DAUGHTER OF LATE DORA AKUNYILI WINS JOYCE ALEXANDER WEIN PRIZE

Daughter of late Dora Akunyili - Former NAFDAC caretaker, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, who has lived and worked in the United States for many years won the Wein Prize – a $50,000 award. The past winners have been Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon and Trenton Doyle Hancock.

The prize – established by George Wein, a founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, in honor of his deceased wife, Joyce Alexander Wein, a trustee of the studio museum in Harlem who died in 2005.

Ms. Crosby, 32, recently moved to Los Angeles and has become known for large-scale paintings that depict African and American domestic scenes. The scenes are visually complicated with collage elements drawn from Nigerian lifestyle magazines, her own photo albums and the Internet, works that, as Smithsonian Magazine wrote, “explore a complex topic – the tug she feels between her adopted home in America and her native country.”

Ms. Crosby’s work has recently been featured in a solo show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and was included in the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial. The prestigious Victoria Miro gallery in London began to represent Ms. Crosby earlier this year, and her work is now the subject of an exhibition at the gallery, organized by the critic Hilton Als.

Thelma Golden, the Studio Museum’s director, said Ms. Crosby was chosen because of her work’s “great innovation and promise” and also because she “truly represents the global nature of the Studio Museum’s mission and reach.”

Credit: nytimes.com