Njideka Akunyili Crosby is the 2015 winner of the tenth annual
Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize. The Studio Museum in Harlem made the
announcement on Monday, October 26, revealing that it was bestowing its
Wein Prize – a $50,000 award
won in the past by esteemed artists like Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon and
Trenton Doyle Hancock – to the Nigerian-born
painter who has lived and worked in the United States for many years.
According to Randy Kennedy in the New York Times, the prize –
established by George Wein, a founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, in
honor of his wife, Joyce Alexander Wein, a trustee of the museum who
died in 2005 – has been given every year since 2006 to established or
emerging African-American artists.
Ms. Crosby, 32, who
recently moved to Los Angeles, 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 anexhibition 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.”
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