Njideka Akunyili-Crosby: Chimamanda of the art world?

You might not have heard about her, but Nigerian born, U.S -based artist Njideka Akunyili-Crosby has been described by CNN “as one of New York’s most promising new talents”. In pop culture parlance, Njideka is the next big thing in the ART world.

I had sought an interview with her in February 2013 but somehow it didn’t work out. So when Victor Ehikhamenor, award winning visual artist and writer – who was in town for the FRIEZE ART FAIR Week and 1.54 African Art Fair – invited me to Tafeta Gallery in Central London, my joy knew no bounds when I met Njideka there. Pronto an interview appointment was fixed for the next day.

A Yale University MFA graduate, her works sold out in the 2012 Arts Basel – the number one fair for modern and contemporary art in the world. She has also participated in a year-long residency with the prestigious Studio Harlem in New York.

Let’s skip the introduction and allow you to dig into this exclusive interview with this brilliant artist who Ehikhamenor describes as the “Chimamanda Of the Art World”. Another exclusive interview onwww.samumukoro.com

You left Nigeria at 16 and you wanted to become a doctor. When did  you decide to become an artist?

It was a smooth transmission and I still ended up graduating with biology major. I took my first art class, the second semester of my first year; after that, I took one or two art classes every semester, so I ended up as a double major. Majoring in art wasn’t really a choice, it was more of I had taken enough classes that I could major in it.

Then after I graduated, I took the year off and went back to Nigeria to do the compulsory National Youth Service Corps and that was my year to really think and make a decision, that was my crossroads moment and I knew I could go either way and it was a lot of weighing where I wanted to go.

I loved doing art more; it didn’t seem like work when I was doing it. When you do what you love, it would never feel like work. That choice felt more relevant, more important like there was more of a stake to it, than doing medicine,  and of course I didn’t want to go into a  “medicine bashing thing” – I was very sick in grad school and doctors saved my life, so medicine is fantastic.

Why was it a defining moment for you?

Just talking about feeling the urgency to do art or feeling like this seems important right now is going back to the conversation we had earlier about it’s hard to want to do the things you can’t  see .

The first time I really thought I could be an artist was through my professor in undergrad, seeing an artist who was living as an artist, teaching art classes, very happy with his life, very contented very smart, very engaged with his work, making very compelling interesting work and it was something I wasn’t aware of.

Of course there had been very interesting artists working in Nigeria for years, the Nsukka group including El Anatsui, but I wasn’t privy to that world and I think a lot of people were not and are not; so just in my mind, art wasn’t something visible, my vision of an artist wasn’t the reality of it.

I   also  felt that there were  many people doing non-conventional things. It was at a time when I was hearing of more people going into the creative field, more people choosing to pursue music, more people choosing to pursue dance, and art and curating and writing and fashion and event planning, things I never heard of when I was young.

When I was young, people will say what do you want to do? and you  will say you want to be an events  planner. The answers were very rigid and then there were all these people challenging what had been the norm and I felt like I wanted to be part of that exciting change; that’s part of why I made that decision.

Did your parents at any time oppose your choice of career?

They didn’t oppose it but I think they questioned it and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. When I have kids, I think it will be okay  for me to question the choices they make, especially if they aren’t part of my world, or things I have no idea about. I think when parents  challenge, it comes from a place of love and I remember reading something once.

There was a guy who gave a graduation speech and he was giving life lessons. I stopped for a second because it wasn’t one of the clichés; it was something I had never heard before. It was ‘your parents don’t always want what’s best for you and that made you stop’.

Why won’t they want what’s best for you? And then the next sentence is ‘they want what  is safe for you’ or something like that. So it just explains  that parents are worried because they go before the kids and they want to know that, when they leave, you won’t suffer, you’ll be comfortable. That is why parents push for safe things. When they push you to do medicine, they are sure you will get a job and you won’t suffer. With art, it’s very unpredictable and that’s where the challenge comes from.

There’s a lot of family in your drawings and paintings. How does this personal narrative influence your visual narrative?

I relate that to when writers say write what you know. It is painting what I know and there is a lot of intimacy in my work. I want you to feel; it’s about trying to maybe envelope someone into a domestic space. Intimacy to come across, it has to be sincere, it is hard for me to make an intimate work if I’m making images of people I don’t know or care about.

So making images of people I know and love and have known for years helps push that for me and it really goes back to what I am doing. A lot of it is trying to put my finger on the Nigeria I grew up in, thinking of Nigeria in the mid-eighties, early nineties. I’m thinking of the change from that to the Nigeria of now and it makes sense to do it through the lens of me because I lived in it  and the other people  who lived in it   with me like my siblings.

I’m glad that you brought that up. Your work captures intimate and sensual situations. What role does your husband play in this creative process?

He is quite involved in the work. He has a really good eye, he’s  a very good critic and I run a lot of things with him.

A lot of artists do it; a lot of times we have studio visits,  we have critics coming in and they give you feedback because  you’re  in this little room for hours every day working. After a point, you don’t see the work anymore,  you’re  so close to it same way a writer will give a friend or an editor a manuscript to read and they come back and they give you feedback.

So I will text him pictures of things in progress and he will give me feedback. ‘No, take that green out, that orange doesn’t match that’. So he’s very helpful. But his aesthetic is very different from mine. When we started dating or when I first started doing art, my colors were very limited. I did a lot of round based paintings and he’s a very colorful person; sounds weird but he loves a lot of colors. He is very into urban culture and street art. And just like influence of street art, he’s very into bright oranges, turquoise. Being with him, I’ve started buying into that urban aesthetic and my colors have become brighter and bolder.

Do your loyalties to Nigeria and your American husband create a contradiction to your works?

Somewhat…

How?

No, I think what it is, is trying to negotiate both, trying to find the in between space or the space where I can straddle both cultures. It is a story of contemporary Africans, especially people of my generation scattered throughout the globe in the UK, in America, in Cuba, in India.

How do we maintain our identity as proud Nigerians and also integrate into the new society we find ourselves in,to create this new hybrid identity? There is this Ghanaian cultural critic who wrote a beautiful essay on “Cosmopolitanism”. His whole thesis is that cosmopolitanism is actually not about a melting pot; people think it’s about all these cultures coming together and melting to be one thing, whereas it is more about difference existing next to difference, but maintaining their differences.

That is what I’m fascinated about. And it’s the story of contemporary cosmopolitan Africans. How do you  exist as a Nigerian in America or in the UK or a Kenyan in South Africa? Just as the world is globalizing and all these movements are happening, there are more and more people in those situations and my work exists on that.

And so I am just thinking of myself as a Nigerian and also an American not only through me having an American citizenship but also with my marriage-which has further rooted me to the country-how do these two differences exist alongside each other and trying to explore that with the work?

Literature coming out of Nigeria and Africa plays a major role in your  work. Can you name the writers that have influenced you?

[Laughs]. Definitely Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie. Of course, there are other people. I was talking to someone recently about a book I had heard a lot about growing up but didn’t read it untill recently, Nervous Conditions, by TsitsiDangarembga.

It was fantastic. But Achebe opened the doors for so many people not just writers. There is a Nigerian curator, Okwui Enwezor, who talks about Chinua Achebe as being important to him, because he[Enwezor] does a lot of promotion of artists of African descent and I know he gets questioned by people on why is it always about people of Africa and all that, that he promotes. B

ut I went for a lecture he gave once and he said nobody ever spoke about people like Andy Warhol who devote their lives to just one artist. He brought up Achebe and talked about this urgency again. He explained that if he doesn’t do it, who will?, and it just seems relevant for him. So I think Achebe did that for everyone. Even Chimamanda spoke about the danger of a single story.

I mean that is something that was very dear to Achebe, his insistence on us telling our story, otherwise other people would tell it to you and it would be a single story, so you complicate it by you telling your own side. I think writers are doing that. I’d like to  think all the other creative people are doing it.

The attention that is coming to the Nigerian fashion industry introduces a different part of the country to the rest of the world with interest that comes to Nigeria.

From Fela to the new school people like D’Banj and then the complexity of Nigeria begins to materialize; that’s why I feel connected with literature. I feel like even though we are all doing different things, there is a connection in terms of what we are doing.

What that draws me to literature is this borrowing of tradition from somewhere. Chinua Achebe wrote in this language (English) that wasn’t his, he inherited it but he was able to take that language and use it to talk about the experience of the place the language is not from. I think the way he was able to do it actually has to do with things he was doing in terms of structure and formal decisions he was making with the language to make that happen.

Achebe has the quote that I love but it’s Achebe quoting Baldwin. He said, ‘English when altered can be made to bear the weight of my African experience. ‘ I really love that because I feel the parallel. My arts training was in America, the Pennsylvania academy which is very rigid. It is like how do I take this tradition that I’ve now inherited and use it to talk about a place that this tradition is not linked to? How do I alter it to make it bear the burden of this other experience? That is where the experimenting and collating and all those things are coming from. Like how do I break it open and make it do something else? It’s is also still evident on where the tradition comes from.

Why do you combine different materials in your work?

I combine different materials because it’s very interesting when work is made that way.

Looking at your creative process, what would you say is the most difficult part?

The beginning. You obviously don’t want to repeat yourself, you have to come up with something, but it’s like your work is one long continuous conversation, so you don’t want to repeat yourself. It is complicated, because it’s like you have this quest you’re on and you never quite feel you’ve got it because once you have, you are done. So you’re like that dog, digging and digging .

It’s the same area you are digging in but it has to be different. The other side is multi-facet. With each piece, I’m looking  at a different facet of a convoluted shape. It is like where do I scan to next because different pieces focus on different things?. But then, just something simple, like what is the image I want to do next?

Do I want to do a group scene? Do I want a single person, two people, is it inside? That takes a lot of time and that work isn’t immediately apparent in the word because all of those decisions require research. So when I go on, the next two weeks would just be research.

I don’t have my Ipad with to show you a picture but then I have a picture here to show you an idea of how much work goes into it and then, once that’s done, at this point I start working and I have to prepare my paper. The next step has to do with color but the color stuff I can figure out as I’m working.