New York-based Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu explores issues around gender, race, colonialism, and the Black female body.
Read MoreSince the 1990s, her collages, sculptures, video works, and installations have created haunting and sometimes grotesque characters to question aesthetic conventions and systems of power.
Mutu was the inaugural artist of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's facade commission in 2019. Her 25-year career is the subject of a survey exhibition, Intertwined (2023), at the New Museum, New York.
Born in Nairobi, Wangechi Mutu migrated to the United States in the 1990s. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art (2000), and a BFA from The Cooper Union (1996).
Impacted by a variety of genres in cultural media, including magazines and films, and their lack of African representation, Mutu's practice is a rebuke to definitive interpretations of beauty.
Mutu has worked with collage, often combining found materials and images, magazine cut-outs, and objects as a way to interpret contemporary life in the West. She draws inspiration from diverse sources such as the fashion industry, pornography, politics, and science fiction.
In Mutu's early collage series, such as 'Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors' (2004–2006), the artist drew from 19th-century medical diagrams, fashion magazines, scientific periodicals, pornographic references, and photographs to explore colonial history, politics, and issues of female identity.
As curator Margot Norton told Ocula Magazine in 2023 on the occasion of the artist's survey exhibition at New Museum in New York: 'Methods of assemblage and collage run throughout her practice, including her work in animation and even her bronze sculptures.'
Mutu's animated video The End of eating Everything (2013), commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, features the singer Santigold as a post-apocalyptic, monstrous being hovering in darkness. Her tumour-like body, covered with machine parts and human limbs emits smoke as she greedily wanders among a flock of birds—a reference to the destructive and self-imposed nature of our drive to consume.
Mutu is regarded for her self-proclaimed 'maximalist aesthetic'. Her wall-based installation A Promise to Communicate (2018) employed grey rescue blankets used by humanitarian aid efforts to reinterpret the world map. Commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, it created a space for visitors to explore ideas of free speech and open communication about sensitive and fundamental global matters.
In 2019 Mutu inaugurated the Metropolitan Museum of Art's facade commission, for the first ever site-specific installation to be presented on The Met's historic exterior. Her installation, The NewOnes, will free Us (2019), represented the artist's symbol of hope and dignity as an African migrant at a time of political change under new presidency in the United States.
Mutu has received numerous awards and accolades through her career, including Artist Honouree, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (2018); Artist Honouree, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2017); National Artist Award, Anderson Ranch Arts Center (2017); United States Artist Fellow (2014); Asher B. Durand Artist of the Year, Brooklyn Museum (2013); and Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year (2010).
In 2012, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University held Wangechi Mutu's first survey in the United States. Entitled A Fantastic Journey, the exhibition presented over 50 works made since the mid 1990s, including collage, drawings, sculpture, installation, and video. The exhibition later travelled to the Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Illinois.
Other notable solo exhibitions include Intertwined, The New Museum, New York (2023); Storm King Art Center, New York (2022); Gladstone Gallery, New York (2021); I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?, Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2021); and The NewOnes, will free Us, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019).
Mutu has exhibited extensively around the world in venues including The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2020); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. (2019); Whitney Biennial, New York (2019); Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (2019); Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI), Rome (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Cape Town (2017); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017); 56th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2013); Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (2012); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (2012); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2010); Tate Liverpool (2010); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2009); and Kunsthalle Wein, Vienna (2008).
Ocula | 2022
