The Artist Who Stopped Us in Our Tracks: Njideka Akunyili Crosby

A few months ago we visited the Norton Museum of Art here in West Palm Beach and came face to face with Super Blue Omo — a large-scale work by Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby that genuinely stopped us in our tracks. Up close, the painting reveals itself slowly: what first reads as a quiet domestic scene — a woman on a sofa, a tea tray, a small television — opens up into something far more layered and alive.

Crosby was born in 1983 in Enugu, Nigeria, and moved to the United States at sixteen. Her work lives in the space between those two worlds, using a remarkable combination of acrylic painting, colored pencil, and photo-transfer techniques to weave Nigerian cultural imagery directly into the surface of her compositions. The figures and furniture sit within walls that, on close inspection, are made up of transferred photographs — Nigerian women, family members, scenes from popular culture, images from home. The domestic and the diasporic exist on the same picture plane, inseparable.

Super Blue Omo takes its name from a well-known Nigerian laundry detergent whose advertisement played on television throughout her childhood in the 1980s — you can see it flickering on the TV set in the work itself. But the title is also a meditation on "blueness" in the emotional sense: the cool glow of the room, the quiet introspection of the lone figure, the particular feeling of being somewhere between belonging and longing.

Her work is held in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney, Tate Modern, and LACMA, among others — and that permanent collection piece at the Norton is one of the finest things in the building. If you haven't seen it in person, it's worth the visit.