In her series The Beautyful Ones (2014–ongoing), Akunyili Crosby paints from photographs of Nigerian children, often of her family and friends, using a photographic transfer process to embed images and patterns that situate the subjects in a specific time, place, and culture. “As I am making my work from my grandparents’ generation to my generation, I’m looking for things that would act as markers for those different times,” the artist states. Mama, Mummy and Mamma (Predecessors #2) (2014), which symbolically represents three generations of women in the artist’s family, closely examines her own history. In the painting, she depicts her sister sitting in front of a wall filled with magazine covers from The New African Woman, photographs, album covers by Nigerian popular musician Kris Okotie, and images of Nigeria’s British colonial past, references that are simultaneously personal and ubiquitous in Nigerian society. 

Bringing together diverse cultural and geographic references, Akunyili Crosby highlights the confluence of her Nigerian and American identities, which shape her sense of self, memories, and lived experience. The artist says, “When you move from place to place, you carry the things that matter to you. The longer away you stay, the more you feel yourself drifting away from where you used to live.” In Ejuna na-aga, ọ kpụlụ nkọlikọ ya; New Haven (Enugu) in New Haven (CT) (2022), the artist paints the interior of her bedroom, laden with specific references to her upbringing in Nigeria. Nigerian magazine covers and traditional textile patterns are superimposed across the canvas, while a rendering of her wedding dress is left intentionally blank, a testament to her new identity in diaspora. In other works, such as Nwantiti (2012), I Always Face You, Even When It Seems Otherwise (2012), and Garden Thriving (2016), the artist places herself and her husband in the frame. In each painting, only the artist is layered with transferred images, visualizing herself as a site of diasporic experience in contrast to the world around her. In each of these works, and throughout her practice, the artist uses her signature collage style to depict the ways in which her identities collide and merge, speaking to her hybridized sense of self as an African woman in the United States, and meditating on the complexities of diaspora.