her methods, materials, and stylistic influences, Akunyili Crosby shows a deep awareness of contemporary artists from Robert Rauschenberg to Kerry James Marshall, while her visual vocabularies suffuse intimate domestic scenes with the products and riotous patterns of her African homeland. Akunyili Crosby produces large-scale drawings and paintings, frequently of interiors that suggest familiar narratives but retain elements of mystery and ambiguity. These scenes are often directly inspired by the artist’s own experiences and memories, and are populated by her family members, friends, and people she has met or recalls from back home.
I particularly enjoy Crosbys use of photo transfers hidden and blended into patterns in her paintings. She makes deliberate and complex use of transfer prints, using a mineral-based solvent to transfer photocopied images from newspapers and product catalogues, magazines and books, onto the support. (Rauschenberg used this technique to great effect in his work starting in the late 1950s.) Akunyili Crosby layers these transfers, creating dense patterns that may move from a figure to parts of a piece of furniture, a background wall, a carpet, or an architectural element, creating an atmosphere of tension and instability. The transferred images are drawn from a wide variety of sources, ranging from colonial-era portraiture through recent popular culture to the intricately detailed Dutch wax-print fabrics produced by the Dutch manufacturer Vlisco for the African market, and they often directly reference Nigerian and African-diaspora culture.
