You will need
Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Predecessors (2013)
Tate
Your students don’t need to know anything about an artwork or artist to start exploring it.
Use these quick group activities to build their confidence and curiosity in sharing their first responses to the artwork. Some artworks they might like straight away, some they might not.
Discovering art can be new, exciting and sometimes confusing. There are no right or wrong ways to respond!
In pairs or as a group, take it in turns to imagine the artworks answering these questions and telling their story.
In pairs or as a group, use your body to respond to the artwork.
Predecessors 2013 is a two-part work by the Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby. The female figure in the left-hand image, wearing a pink dress and seated in a domestic living room environment, is the artist’s alter ego: a modern woman who embodies the nature of a cosmopolitan African lifestyle through her clothes, style and mannerisms. The right-hand image presents a kitchen. On display are several utensils and kitchen tools, which belong to different periods of Nigeria’s history.
Completing the imagery in both parts of the work are family photographs and personal memorabilia, mixed with cut-outs from popular magazines and newspapers. This work is rooted in personal experience and an interest in storytelling. Crosby’s work reflects her deep love for Nigeria and her appreciation of Western culture through creating connections between places, people, histories and generations, exploring what it means for different cultures and experiences to interact.
Predecessors prompts us to think about interwoven cultures and histories in everyday life. In this activity, think about your experiences as a kind of material from which you can create an artwork.
Adapt
Focus on selecting images from magazines, newspapers or other source material that connect with your experiences.
Gather sets of images together, then move them around and rearrange them into a collage.
Now add paint, fabric and other textures to bring multiple layers into this new world.
3. Be inventive! You might borrow a figure from a family gathering, a meal from a long-ago holiday, the view from a window in a past house or a tree or flowers from your grandparents' garden. Spend five minutes sketching this new world.
4. Use paint to continue making. Think about how you can experiment and draw with your paintbrush. Be brave and enjoy the paint – notice where the colour bleeds or how a ‘mistake’ might reveal something new. Ask yourself what it feels like to ‘make a painting’ rather than ‘colour in’ a picture. Really look at the paint to see what it’s doing!
5. Take some time to look at the world you have created. Look back at Crosby’s image again. Do you see it differently in any way?
6. With a partner think through some of the following questions:
How did you find working with paint?
How many ways can you describe what the paint looks like on the paper?
What story does your picture tell now?
How does it feel to bring separate aspects of your experience into one story?
What would you title your artwork?
How does the title add to your story?
7. At the end of your lesson, bring all of your paintings to the front of your classroom and look at them together. Find each other’s stories and celebrate the artwork you’ve just made!
What have you learned by experimenting with painting to tell your stories?
What does the image you’ve created represent to you?
Extend
Invite your students to work in pairs and be brave! Cut your painting in half, quarters, eighths, swapping pieces with each other to make further worlds. Explore how this continues to bring different stories together, creating new possibilities.
Become a part of your artwork, or invite someone else into the piece, by making another drawing/painting of yourself/them or by adding any materials that you brought from home.
Making art is a powerful way to learn new skills, explore ideas and express ourselves creatively. Encourage your students to discover new materials, techniques and methods inspired by great artists at Tate.
2. Explore (10 minutes)
3. Make (30 minutes)
