At YCBA, Two Artists Look Ahead

We can’t read the expression on the subject of the painting, but that’s not where the eye goes anyway. Maybe we look first at the vibrant clothing she’s wearing. Or maybe we’ve already seen the element that makes the painting one to stop and linger at: that the carpet is in fact an elaborate collage of photographs. Whether we know the people in the pictures or not, we recognize them as people representing a place, a past, a culture. There’s commotion beneath the calm, questions beneath the assertiveness.

The painting — entitled ​“The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” Might Not Hold True For Much Longer — is part of a show of the work of contemporary artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, curated by Hilton Als, staff writer at The New Yorker. The show runs now through Jan. 22 at the Yale Center for British Art and marks the third in a series of Als-curated shows that began with Celia Paul in 2018 and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in 2019. It’s also one of two ongoing shows at the YCBA that points much more directly into the future than the past.

“One striking aspect of this work,” writes Als of Crosby’s painting, ​“is how Akunyili Crosby frames her subject. She is not facing the artist and thus the audience, but looks toward a future that we cannot see. She may not be able to see it either, but it is there. Resting on the visual signs of her culture, which the artist has assembled into a rug, Akunyili Crosby’s subject, in this very quiet work, sits in a domestic space. The table is laden with objects that connote a recent repast. With her arms folded around her legs, Akunyili Crosby’s subject is relaxed, and is engaged by something she’s observing out of frame. Another frame, such as a television? A computer? Or some other aspect of modern visual life? Maybe she’s talking to another person. The mystery of engagement informs this work, and lies at the heart of all of Akunyili Crosby’s characters.”

The painting is also emblematic of the series, in the way it depicts the subjects of the painting in relation to their pasts. ​“In her ongoing series The Beautyful Ones, artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby takes as her subject children she came across in family albums, or observed and photographed on trips to her native Nigeria,” Als writes in an accompanying text. ​“The paintings … are framed by vulnerability, hope, and a certain self-awareness. Inspired by the Ghanaian author Ayi Kweh Armah’s classic 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, which centers on political and personal idealism and corruption, Akunyili Crosby’s vibrant canvases are alive with, and to, her understanding of her various subjects’ layered, complex, and vulnerable lives. Using acrylic paint, pastel, colored pencils, and photo transfers, Akunyili Crosby does not, in the end, achieve a single effect in a canvas. Indeed, her paintings present a world that is literally layered, and deeply committed to the depth to be found on the surfaces that make up intimate and private spaces, including the body. Akunyili Crosby’s figures ask: How am I being read? How would you like to read me? Am I part of this world, or am I aspiring to the next? In short, how does a child come to be on this ​‘new’ continent?” 

Als informs us that Crosby was born in Nigeria and emigrated to the United States at 16. The paintings in The Beautyful Ones fit into Crosby’s larger concerns of examining ​“the diasporic experience to communicate various ideas about the meaning to be found in being an outsider, and in belonging.”

Though Crosby is painting from her own complex experience, her work also gets at the thorny questions surrounding any immigrant groups — in a way, no matter when their families may have immigrated. Her works portray the past as a complicated thing. It can be a source of strength and a burden. How much do we owe to our family’s pasts? We are often told to stay true to who we are, but what does that really mean in practice? What from the past should we take with us into the future? What can we leave behind?

By focusing on children, Crosby sharpens the point of those questions further for any of us who are parents. We always say we want better for our children than we had for ourselves. What happens when that means our children want to let go of something in the past that we think is valuable? How much of your children moving on from the past means moving on from you? And how do we all move toward acceptance of that?

The weight of these questions is in some ways placed on the viewer, because, for the most part, the kids are all right. The girl in Series #1c is typical of Crosby’s subjects, which ​“look directly at the viewer, less as an act of defiance than as a declaration of being,” Als writes. ​“The subject in ​“The Beautyful Ones” Series #1c is on the brink of adolescence; her shoes are those of a girl who is too young for heels but too old for flats. Her transformation from girl to woman is echoed by the images making up her clothing. Akunyili Crosby sheathes this female character in images taken from African popular culture, mixing them with pictures that inspire her own work.” The technique is also implying that this reckoning with the past is something that we place on them. Do kids know about their past if we don’t tell them?

At the same time, Crosby deftly shows how the political, racism, and economic oppression of the past can spill over into the present. In two of the paintings in the show, Crosby ​“offers the viewer images of African girlhood blooming amid colonialism, terrorism, and loss,” Als writes. In one painting of a girl in a communion dress, the whiteness of her garb ​“draws attention not only to her skin, but also to the very idea and reality of the power of Christianity and thus European religious influences on a non-European nation. And while white, of course, connotes purity and virginity, Akunyili Crosby’s subject is surrounded by anything but; advertisements and beauty stories promoting European and North American ideas of glamour glut the immediate world of the frame, while a white doll, totemlike, stands close by. Similarly, the girl in the red school uniform in ​‘The Beautyful Ones’ Series #6 is a single figure not immune to advertising or history. Indeed, among the images and stories at her feet is a headline about the Chibok schoolgirls who, in 2014, were kidnapped by Boko Haram, an extremist Islamist group.”

Taken as a whole, Crosby’s work manages to take on the troubles and trickiness of the past and the present all at once. In her paintings, these forces swirl around her subjects like a storm. The questions about how kids move into the future in the face of all of that can seem hopelessly complex; we adults often lose our way within those questions, even as we try to sort them out. But amid all that, Crosby makes a lot of space for optimism. It resides not in the paintings’ backgrounds, and not necessarily in us, the viewers. Crosby instead puts it in the faces of her subjects. Some of them look back out from Crosby’s canvases as if they know the answers already.

On the same floor as the Crosby show is an installation by artist Richard Long that succeeds wildly in transforming the particular room it’s in. It makes the space feel like a place of ritual and reverence, even as it also seems to melt the walls a bit, bringing the complex shapes of nature into the gallery’s hard geometry. The piece, entitled Quantock Wood Circle, is in the museum through Feb. 19 and ​“consists of 285 broken pine branches collected by the artist from the Quantock Hills near his hometown of Bristol in England. Following the artist’s instructions, the sticks are placed in any combination in a circle on the floor, rendering each display unique. For Long, the process gives the work ​‘a freer or more democratic status than a traditional sculpture’ because it can be ​‘re-made, re-mixed, or re-played, almost like music.’ ”

That playfulness is on evident display at the Center for British Art. As you enter the room, signs instruct you to look down rather than at the walls to find the installation. Despite this, a security guard informed this reporter, museum goers wander into the sculpture up to three or four times a day. Usually only a few sticks are displaced, and quickly re-placed. Sometimes, however, a rambunctious kid makes it all the way across the floor, whereupon staff from the museum, working from a photograph, restore the piece. This delightful dynamic seems more like a feature than a bug. Freedom and democracy really are chaotic.

The maintenance also doesn’t detract from the larger goals Long has in mind. ​“Since the 1960s, Long has created artworks based upon his walks in the English countryside and abroad. Often embedded in the landscape, these site-specific works blur the boundaries between sculpture, photography, and performance. In Quantock Wood Circle, materials collected while walking are brought into the museum, activating the floor and raising questions about our relationship with space, place, and nature.”

It’s unclear what exactly about the floor is being ​“activated,” but the questions are quite valid. Long’s piece, with its emphasis on connecting to the environment, also has something to say about how to make beautiful, moving art that is utterly sustainable. Artists making art that deals with the environment ultimately must come to terms with the fact that many artmaking materials are based on finite resources and wasteful manufacturing techniques. Besides being highly toxic, for example, oil and acrylic paint are petroleum products; regardless of where we fall on the ethics of using them, there is the simple fact that, eventually, we won’t have them anymore. Same goes for many contemporary art supplies. By contrast, approaches by artists like Long are showing fellow artists the way into the future. The world is changing fast. How we make art can change with it, and in the process, help us come to terms with, and adapt to, the even greater changes in store.

“The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby” runs through Jan. 22 at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St. ​“Richard Long: Quantock Wood Circle” runs through Feb. 19. Visit the YCBA’s website for hours and more information.