Information
reaching us has it that 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, 2015 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. 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.”
Source:
The New York Times
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