Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Norton Museum of Art's RAW: In Retrospect exhibition.

Over the last few days I have been exploring Norton Museum of Art's Recognition of Women in Art: In Retrospect exhibition and the included works of Jenny Saville and Marío Berrío included therein. Today I turn to the works of Njideka Akunyili Crosby.

Njideka, according to one source, "burst onto the art scene in 2010 with her large-scale mixed media works that mix figurative painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and collage. Her layered compositions of interiors combine her LA surroundings with images from her birth country Nigeria and recall the complexity of contemporary experience."

The Crosby works on show at the In Retrospect exhibition were Rebranding My Love (2011), The Beautyfull Ones, Series #1b (2014), and Super Blue Omo (2016).

Rebranding My Love was the earliest of the three paintings on display and shows a male lying diagonally across a bed with a black female perched partially on his back. The outline of the male's body is painted in white while the upper portion of the arm and back is decorated with a variety of images. The visible parts of the female's body are, likewise ,decorated with images. The bed is covered with a paneled coverlet, each panel inlaid with an image. The coverlet has a dominant yellow coloring furthest away from the viewer and striking blues and browns closer in. There are prominent parts in the female's hair. The background is a jarring orange with varying gradations of intensity as you move from right to left.

The artist's husband is white and I see her saying here that she can provide a foundation of her culture for him to lay on, and she can wrap him in her cultural norms and practices, but there will always be a part of him that will remain "untouched." 

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Re-branding My Love, 2011

The Beautyfull Ones portray Nigerian youths, some of whom are Crosby's own family members. Series #1b is a portrait of her sister at about 10 years of age, "filtered through Diego Velázquez's portrait of Prince Baltasar Carlos."  I have included a copy of the Prince's portrait for comparison purposes.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, 
The Beautyfull Ones, Series #1b, 2014

Diego Velazquez, Prince Baltasar Carlos

When compared, the opulence of the Prince's regalia is replaced by a patchwork of photographs. The Crosby work includes an "intricate layering of xerox transfer, paint, pastel and colored pencil, creating a matrix of interlocking planes" (christies.com).

The artist talks about "flipping the script" of the Prince's painting. The color scheme in the Prince's portrait is dark with lighter grey tones along the arms. The color scheme in her sister's portrait is reversed. The darkness comes with the arms while the attire is grey-white.

Artchive describes Super Blue Omo as a genre painting associated with the Postcolonial art movement. "The composition is rich with layers, not only in its physical appearance but also in its cultural and historical implications, inviting a deep and reflective engagement from its audience."

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Super Blue Omo, 2016

The title of the painting supposedly hearkens back to a detergent that was widely advertised and sold in the artist's homeland during her childhood. The image on the TV is in some way related.

A light blue color permeates the artwork and is contrasted by the deep blue square on the back wall. As is Crosby's practice, the painting is suffused with images from a variety of sources emplaced on almost every available surface.

The TV is angled to allow viewing from the sofa but the subject is herself angled away from the TV and staring into the distance. The tea/coffee setting is for two but there is only one person present. The angle of the table to the sofa is suggestive of someone pushing that table back in order to leave the scene and the subject could be looking at whatever that person is doing.

A very well-aligned piece.

Norton Museum's Recognition of Women in Art: In Retrospect -- Select María Berrío works

Yesterday I introduced Norton Museum of Art's Recognition of Women In Art: In Retrospect exhibition and the works of Jenny Saville included therein. Today I turn to the works of María Berrío.

María grew up in Colombia but moved to New York City to complete her Fine Arts education; she now lives and works in the city. Her artwork, according to Norton Museum of Art literature, "reflects on her upbringing and experience through intricate collages which demonstrate the complexity of identity through a multicultural lens." 

According to The Women's Studio:

Berrio’s intricate collage technique animates the works’ surfaces. The images are constructed on very large stretched canvases. Using paper like paint, Berrío lays down narrow strips of cut paper – either painted or printed – to contour a human body or a gnarled tree. She then adds tiny flakes to represent flowers or leaves. She draws in some details such as the faces and hands of the people or the eyes and delicate beak of a bird. The flatness of the surface gives her work a faceted, jewel-like appearance.

The pieces included in the Norton Museum exhibition are The Quiet Undoing (2020), Anemochory (2019), and The Woman in the Dunes (2022).

The Quiet Undoing has a woman with crossed legs reclining in a chair with her posture oriented towards the viewer and with bougainvilleas plastered over the wall behind her. The chair does not seem to be appropriately positioned to support her weight/posture and she is somewhat squeezed into the lower left hand side of the painting so that the bougainvilleas can be the focus. While the scene looks like a painting in this rendition, an in-person view clearly shows the leaves and flowers as collages and the same holds true for the floor tiles.

María Berrío, The Quiet Undoing, 2020

In describing this work, the artist states:

Bougainvillea is one of my favourite flowers. It reminds me of growing up in Colombia, where you can see its splendour everywhere in absurd abundance. One of the reasons I wanted to paint this flower was because of its “paper-like” quality: when I see them, they remind me of the paper I use to create my paintings.

When I imagine this village I am creating, I imagine warm weather, a breeze that carries the smell of the sea. A town where flowers are blooming everywhere, where gorgeous cascades of bougainvillea drift down the walls of homes. Where people sit and wait for the day to pass, where there are no hurries or time constraints, no need to be anywhere, just the need to be present.

That’s where the woman depicted in this painting is. She is sitting and contemplating her present. Her arms and legs are crossed and she seems pensive. The air, I imagine, is heavy, thick with humidity. The bougainvillea behind her is a riotous symbol of life, a life that is blooming, lush and wild, a life which is behind her.

This was the last piece I created for this exhibition. On reflection, I think of this painting as a manifestation of my own hopes and desires: a warm afternoon, a calm atmosphere, a day of contemplation, a day of silence and reflection. The months that have accompanied the making of the works for this show have been full of noise and fear ...This last piece was me trying to take a deep breath, trying to smell the sea, trying to cultivate the same hope, endurance, and adaptation that animate the figures of my work.’ – María Berrío.

María Berrío, Anemochory, 2019

In Anemochory, 

Berrío hints at a desert setting by depicting a dragon blood tree, a species native to the island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean. The inverted quality of its roots suggests an allusion to immigrants. The figures in the painting appear to be in a dreamlike setting, in a state of limbo. One disheveled girl is flopped width-wise on a four-poster bed as though impatiently exhausted by the interminable wait for something interesting to happen. On a nearby chair, her more neatly garbed companion sits gingerly holding a large butterfly, her sidelong gaze betraying wistfulness. Considering Berrío’s interest in depicting displaced immigrant people, Anemochory can be interpreted as a representation of the uncertain yet hopeful pathway people take to migrate, embodied here by the landscape and the actions of the characters, which allude to the idea of waiting for the next step to take in this journey -- Perez Art Museum/Artillery Magazine

The Woman in the Dunes has a woman diagonally arrayed in the painting but, as in the case of The Quiet Undoing, she does not occupy the entire picture frame. Rather, the portion of the painting closest to her seems more formal and business-like than does the upper-right portion. The subject's knees are slightly raised, as is the hem of the pleated skirt, pulled up, as it is, by the subject's right hand. The subject has a somewhat rounded face with the chin twisted to the viewer's left.

María Berrío, The Woman in the Dunes, 2022

A brown briefcase stands on the subject's left side and there appears to be a pair of grey pumps just beyond it. Over towards the hint of a waterline one can see a white picnic bag and sandals, accessories more befitting the locale. My interpretation is of a young woman just about to transition from a hard day at work to the start of a relaxing weekend at the beach.

Norton Museum's Recognition of Women in Art: In Retrospect -- Select Jenny Saville works

 In 2011, West Palm Beach's Norton Museum of Art launched an exhibition series titled Recognition of Art by Women (RAW) "dedicated to honoring a contemporary female painter or sculptor." To date the institution has presented 10 exhibitions in the series and is now running a derivative exhibition called Recognition of Art by Women: In Retrospect which presents a limited selection from nine of the 10 artists showcased so far. I will showcase these selections -- individually -- over the course of the next few weeks beginning herein with Jenny Saville.

In 2011, Saville's self-titled exhibition was the first in the RAW series ad also her first career survey at a North American Museum. Literature accompanying the In Retrospect exhibition describes Saville's work as forging "a bold visual language that unites figuration and abstraction ... Saville's works evoke both sensuality and objectivity through large-scale, intricate paintings. Her subjects are sculptural, influenced by the Old European Masters  who inform her practice."

Her pieces Atonement Studies -- Central Panel (Rosetta) and Mnemosyme 1 were on display at RAW: In Retrospect.

Atonement Studies is a Neo-Expressionism piece. Artnet describes it as depicting a blind woman Saville met while living and working in Palermo, a subjcet the artist calls "the most beautiful woman I have ever photographed." Artnet points to the subject's "tilted head, parted lips, milky eyes and striking bone structure all illuminated by her peachy skin tone and blue-ish shadows as a feat of expressionist glory."

Jenny Saville, Atonement Studies --
Central Panel (Rosetta), 2005 - 06

Saville is an accomplished Draughtsperson. She captures time in this charcoal drawing by including several arms and legs in different locations to show the movement of an energetic child.

Jenny Saville, Mnemosyne 1, 2012