“The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived,

2023

This complex screenprint, made in collaboration with Highpoint Center master printer Cole Rogers, is based on Crosby’s series of paintings that explore the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. In these works the artist counters Armah’s blistering critique of post-independence Africa with images that present a more hopeful view of a younger generation. Here she pictures herself turning away from the viewer. She sits upon a floor dense with images pulled from popular Nigerian magazines, family photo archives, and album covers. The still life on the tabletop beside her repro- duces objects photographed at her grandmother’s home in a village outside of Enugu, Nigeria. In this work and others in the series, she depicts spaces filled with objects that reference and help reconcile the disparate identities that were shaped by her experiences growing up in Nigeria, where she lived until age sixteen, and her subsequent life in the United States.