11/10/2017

Late Dora Akuniyili’s Daughter Njideka Wins the 2017 MacArthur Genius Award!



Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...Njideka Akunyili Crosby has been announced as one of the recipient’s of the 2017 MacArthur Fellowship–also called the genius grant–alongside 23 others.  Latimes reports that among those awarded the fellowship this year by the MacArthur Foundation are artists, writers, academics and scientists, each of whom will receive the $625,000 no-strings-attached grant because they “have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction…as an investment in their potential.”

The grant is paid out over five years.Njideka Akunyili Crosby, who is the daughter of late amazon Dora Akunyili, was praised by the foundation for her large-scale works that “express the hybridity characteristics of transnational experience through choices of subject matter, materials, and techniques.”
LaTimes adds that she “currently has a solo exhibition at the Tang Museum in upstate New York (through December 31) “and that the “Baltimore Museum will present a suite of new paintings on October 25.”
In June 2016, Crosby won the Prix Canson and by November, she set a new record for the artist at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale where her 2012 painting – “Drown” – initially estimated to sell for $200,000 – $300,000, was sold for a whooping $1,092,500.
Reportedly, some 11 people bidded for the piece before it went to an anonymous bidder. The work is said to be an intimate double portrait of her embracing her husband, Justin.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu in 1983, but she later moved to the United States and has been living there for the past 17 years.PBS adds that the 34-year-old “explores how migration shapes identity and what it means to exists in hybrid spaces, where different people, cultures and influences collide.” When she is not making art, or suffers creative block, she turns to literature, especially to the works of Junot Díaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Binyavanga Wainaina and Chinua Achebe.
“Reading writers who are exploring the same theme as me and hope something will spark an idea. Someone I think about a lot is the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. I look for him in terms of content but also in terms of how he does it. He wrote about a space he knew–he grew up in Nigeria from when it was colonized to when it gained independence. I look to him for that with the urgency to tell stories from marginalized spaces. But another reason I look at him is to figure out how he does this successfully,” she said in an interview.
Now, she has earned the deserved fellowship.
Congratulations to her.

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