Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s portraits feel static on the walls of the Huntington Library. Thomas Gainsborough’s famous “Blue Boy” painting in the adjacent room suddenly feels stagnant and deflated. The Nigerian-born and Los Angeles-based artist’s large-scale collages are autobiographical, incorporating personal and found imagery, and operate like mosaic maps, tracing kaleidoscopic constellations of memory and identity. 

The exhibition is part of Hilton Als’ curated series organized in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, which includes a selection of works from Akunyili Crosby’s ongoing portrait series, The Beautyful Ones, depicting children in Nigeria. The series title references the 1968 novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, by Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah which examines the dynamics of life and self in postcolonial Ghana.          

In an interview, Als once stated, “There is a science fiction element to Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s situations—of doom waiting to subsume the patterns of life as the people seem to grow out of the patterned wallpaper, the patterned clothes.” Akunyili Crosby’s painted collages of personal and found photographs activate the subjects of her portraits in a way that feels generative and vibrational—static rhythms that point to constant appropriation, movement, and emergence (particularly related to the formation of diasporic identity). These rhythms are not dissimilar to the emergent rhythms that exist in nature and the surrounding gardens. Octavia Butler surfaces in my mind as I think about Als’ reference to science fiction and the exhibition’s location in Pasadena (where Butler lived). Children are often the protagonists in Butler’s novels. Looking at one of Akunyili Crosby’s portraits of a young Nigerian girl, I see Lauren from Parable of The Sower, who considered God to be Change: “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.” Like Lauren, Akunyili Crosby’s subjects are brave, complex, and perpetually changing. 

Huntington Art Gallery
1151 Oxford Rd
San Marino, CA 91108
On view through June 12, 2023