The Stories Beneath the Surface
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What Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Juachi share about patience, layering, and meaning
There is a certain kind of painting that feels alive long after you’ve looked away.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby has built a career creating exactly that kind of work. Her paintings are layered with memories, relationships, histories, and quiet moments that reveal themselves gradually. What appears simple from a distance becomes increasingly complex the closer you move toward it.
Born in Nigeria and later relocating to the United States, Akunyili Crosby’s work often explores the experience of existing between worlds. Nigerian imagery sits beside Western influences. Family photographs merge with painted scenes. Personal memories become part of larger conversations about identity, migration, belonging, and home.
What makes her work so compelling is the way it mirrors memory itself. Memories rarely arrive as complete stories. They come in fragments. A familiar pattern. A photograph tucked into a corner. A room you have not visited in years. A face that reminds you of another time. Her paintings embrace that feeling, building scenes that reward curiosity and patience
This approach recently found its way into one of the most talked about paintings of the year, The Obamas: Springing Forth. Rather than focusing solely on the two figures at its center, Akunyili Crosby filled the work with photographs, personal references, family history, and symbols connected to the lives that shaped them. The result feels less like a portrait and more like a visual archive, one that asks viewers to spend time uncovering the stories hidden beneath the surface.
That commitment to storytelling through detail is one of the reasons her work resonates with so many people. It is also why it reminds us of artdey artist, Juachi.
Like Akunyili Crosby, Juachi is a Nigerian woman whose work rewards patience. Like her, she came to art through another discipline — architecture — bringing a structural approach to image-making. And like her, she builds layered compositions that ask you to look longer than you planned to.
Juachi’s practice explores language, meaning, and cognition through a visual system that translates how the mind processes the world. Her paintings bring together the mundane, the dreamlike, and the analytical, constructing scenes that feel like snapshots of thought itself
Both artists understand that depth is not created through complexity alone. It comes from intention. It comes from building worlds that feel lived in. It comes from trusting viewers to discover meaning for themselves.
At artdey, that is the kind of work we are always drawn to. Work that reveals itself over time. Work that rewards a second look. Work that reminds us that the most memorable stories are rarely the loudest ones.
Sometimes they are simply waiting in the background, asking us to slow down long enough to notice them.
- Alex
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