Njideka Akunyili Crosby valuation
Layers paint, charcoal and photo transfers of Nigerian life into large interiors that hold two homes at once.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in 1983 and grew up in Enugu, Nigeria, moving to Lagos at thirteen for secondary school and to the United States at sixteen.
What a work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby is worth
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Bio
Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in 1983 and grew up in Enugu, Nigeria, moving to Lagos at thirteen for secondary school and to the United States at sixteen. She studied art and biology at Swarthmore College, graduating in 2004, then at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Yale School of Art, where she took her MFA. Her large works on paper combine painting, drawing, collage and photo transfers of Nigerian magazines, family photographs and political figures, layered into domestic interiors that join her life in Los Angeles to the Nigeria she grew up in. Her first museum solo exhibition was at the Hammer Museum in 2015, she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and her work was in the Venice Biennale of 2019.
She works slowly and her galleries place her work carefully, so most of it is in museums or major collections and little comes to market. When a work does, provenance through her galleries and its exhibition history are the first questions.
Enugu, Yale and The Beautyful Ones
The Beautyful Ones, her series of portraits of Nigerian children and young people, takes its title from Ayi Kwei Armah's novel, and the National Portrait Gallery in London showed it in 2018.
In 2018 she designed the mural that wrapped the Museum of Contemporary Art's Grand Avenue building in Los Angeles.
The Studio Museum, Counterparts and the Obama Center
Akunyili Crosby began at Swarthmore on the premedical course and only turned to art in her final year. After Yale she was artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she met her mentor Wangechi Mutu. The transfers in her work are made with acetone from her own photographs taken in Nigeria, family pictures and Nigerian magazines, and The Rest of Her Remains, of 2010, borrows the pose of Manet's The Dead Toreador.
Solo exhibitions followed at the Norton Museum of Art in 2016, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, which opened Predecessors in 2017, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, which opened Counterparts in 2018. She appeared in the 2018 documentary The Price of Everything, the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned a work from her in 2021, and in April 2026 the Obama Foundation commissioned a portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama from her for the lobby of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. She is represented by Victoria Miro in London and David Zwirner.
Best auction results
- Bush Babies $3.4m
- Painted 2017 · New York · 16 May 2018
- Publicly reported
- Including fees, against an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000; the proceeds went to the Studio Museum in Harlem. An auction record for the artist.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
