You’re not going to rush Nigerian artist Nideka Akunyili Crosby, writes Robin Pogrebin for The New York Times.

Crosby, 40, who studied at Swarthmore College and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before earning her master’s at Yale University, has a slow and exacting approach to her work.

Take the self-portrait “Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens,” which shows her in patterned pants holding her youngest on a porch surrounded by greenery.

She spent hours looking through pictures of flora and fauna from Nigeria and Los Angeles, visiting a plant store and the Huntington art museum’s botanical gardens “looking for a very particular leaf.”

“Normally I would have said, it takes me about three months to do a work, but it’s slowly been extending into longer,” she said. “I’ve slowed down to get what I need.”

Her work is a mix of drawing, painting, collage, and printmaking, evoking scrapbooks or patchwork quilts that blend her Nigerian and American cultures and memories.

The artist’s work is already held by the Met, the Tate, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. At auction last fall, her art sold for more than $4.7 million.

Read more about Nideka Akunyili Crosby in The New York Times.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby talks about her ties to Nigeria and on painting cultural collision.