The Beautyful Ones

The Beautyful Ones is Victoria Miro's 2019 hardcover on Njideka Akunyili Crosby's ongoing series of that name, with an essay by Siddhartha Mitter.

The book reproduces works from the series at length. Mitter's essay reflects on the history of the series and what went into making it. Victoria Miro presents it as only the second publication on the artist. Her CV lists exhibitions titled The Beautyful Ones at Art + Practice in Los Angeles in 2015, the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2018 and Victoria Miro in Venice in 2019.

Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1983, moved to the United States in 1999 and lives and works in Los Angeles. She took an MFA at Yale in 2011 and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017. Her densely layered figurative compositions show family and friends in domestic scenes, and their surfaces carry patterned photo-collage passages drawn from Nigerian pop culture and politics.