[Pictures] See Late Prof Dora Akunyili's Daughter who won The Wein Prize worth $50,000

The Studio Museum in Harlem announced Monday 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 Njideka Akunyili Crosby, a Nigerian-born painter who
has lived and worked in the United States for many years.
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 Magazinewrote, “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 an exhibition 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.”