ABOUT NJIDEKA AKUNYILI CROSBY

Nijideka Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She was one of Financial Times’ 2016 Women of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Future Generation Art Prize. She is the recipient of the Prix Canson Prize, 2016, Foreign Policy’s Leading 100 Global Thinkers of 2015, the New Museum’s Next Generation Prize, 2015, the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, 2015, and the Smithsonian’s James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize, 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include I Refuse to be Invisible, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (2016) and The Beautyful Ones, Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2015), staged concurrently with a solo presentation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015). Akunyili Crosby has recently displayed work at institutional venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); the New Museum, New York (2015); and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014). Her work is in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, The Norton Museum of Art, Zeitz MOCAA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

ABOUT XAVIERA SIMMONS

Xaviera Simmons’ work spans photography, performance, video, sound, sculpture and installation. She defines her studio practice, which is rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, abstraction, present and future histories—specifically shifting notions surrounding landscape—as cyclical rather than linear. Simmons is committed equally to the examination of different artistic modes and processes. Simmons received her BFA from Bard College (2004) after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Transatlantic slave trade with Buddhist monks. She completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art (2005) while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with The Maggie Flanigan Studio. In 2015, Simmons was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Robert Rauschenberg) Grant. Simmons has exhibited nationally and internationally where major exhibitions and performances include The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; The Public Art Fund; The Sculpture Center; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Brooklyn Museum, among many others. Her works are in major museum and private collections including The Nasher Museum, Deutsche Bank, The Rubell Family Collection, UBS, The Guggenheim Museum, The Agnes Gund Art Collection, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Studio Museum in Harlem, ICA Miami, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Perez Art Museum in Miami, and David Castillo Gallery.

ABOUT DAWIT PETROS

Born in Asmara, Eritrea, Dawit Petros lives and works Montreal, Chicago, and New York. He investigates boundaries in artistic, geographical, and cultural contexts. His practice centers around a critical rereading of the relationship between African and European modernisms. His current research investigates historical and contemporary narratives of mobility. Petros studied art as a Fulbright Fellow at Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; photography at Concordia University, Montreal, and history at The University of Saskatchewan. Recent exhibition venues include The Kansas City Art Institute’s H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City; Huis Marseille Museum of Photography, Amsterdam; The Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio; and The Studio Museum in Harlem. He has been awarded an Independent Study Fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art, an Art Matters Fellowship, and Canada Council for the Arts Production Grants. His works are in institutional collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Royal Ontario Museum of Art, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board.

ABOUT TREVOR SCHOONMAKER

Prospect.4 Artistic Director Trevor Schoonmaker, Chief Curator and Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, has selected 73 local, national, and international, artists that will present their work throughout New Orleans for Prospect.4.  The triennial will continue the organization’s tradition of showcasing the work of artists from around the globe. Taking into consideration the 300th anniversary of New Orleans’s founding and the city’s strategic location on the Gulf of Mexico, P.4 will direct its focus southward, placing greater emphasis on art and artists that engage the Global South, specifically from North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the European powers that colonized these regions.