Wangechi Mutu (born 1972) is a Kenyan American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work.
[3] Mutu's work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma, and environmental destruction and notions of beauty and power.
These travels back and forth, she says, help give her valuable perspective: New York has "an addictive potency," and its density of creative, entrepreneurial people inspires her greatly; Nairobi is "layered, lush, and encourages a coexistence between humans and the natural world," and Mutu describes Kenya as a very attractive country, despite its "anglophone trauma.
Mutu's work crosses a variety of mediums, including collage, bricolage, video, performance, and sculpture, and investigates themes of gender, race, and colonialism.
[6] These mediums, many of which involve the mixing of materials, sources, and imagery, are more than just formal choices--they hint towards foundational themes of resilience and regeneration that appears throughout her oeuvre.
[13] It's also been said that Mutu's use of such intentionally repulsive or otherworldly imagery may help women to step away from society's ideas of perfection and instead embrace their own imperfections and become more accepting of the flaws of others as well.
[14] Although her imagery of female figures has often been described as "grotesque", she claims they are instead "disabled", displaying a manifestation of historical and societal tensions present in black women's identities.
[15] In her Sentinel series which has been active from 2016 until now, she creates regal and fierce abstract female forms made from clay, wood and various found materials.
[16] In an interview with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia curator, Rachel Kent, she states, "I try to stretch my own ideas about appropriate ways to depict women.
[20]" The themes and narratives of Mutu's work create a visual representation of certain social, political, and physical realities of the world today.
As a result, she is able to generate unique perspectives by under-represented identities, thus broadening and improving discourse surrounding certain issues, while also recognizing and emphasizing the importance of these women and their experiences.
[15] Mutu views her own art as a form of self-reflection, and as a way to process her own identity being boiled down to "black" as an African woman in America.
[22] In her 2013–2014 installation at the Brooklyn Museum, the curatorial placard accompanying her work A'gave described Afrofuturism as "an aesthetic that uses the imaginative strategies of science fiction to envision alternate realities for Africa and people of African descent".
Specific elements of Mutu's art that situate her within this genre include her amalgamations of humans and machines, or cyborgs, within collages such as Family Tree[24] as well as the film The End of Eating Everything.
[25] In Family Tree, as in many of her works, Mutu deliberately constructs both a past and a future within the single figure through displaying diagrams from antique medical journals as well as mechanical images.
The use of Afrofuturistic aesthetics also allows for creative freedom in rendering bodies and representations of identities and experiences, as can be seen with the presence of cyborgs and alien-like figures in her works.
[12] In the goal of creating distinct representations of struggles and tensions for female and African identities, the principles and aesthetics of Afrofuturism work well with Mutu's use of collage and mixed media art.
They transformed the Upper East Side Salon 94 townhouse in New York into a subterranean dinner-party setting entitled Exhuming Gluttony: A Lover's Requiem.
The artists strove to show a moment of gluttony as she stated, "I wanted to create a feast, a communing of minds and viewers Something has gone wrong, there is a tragedy or unfolding of evil".
In 2013, Wangechi Mutu's first-ever animated video, The End of Eating Everything,[22] was created in collaboration with recording artist Santigold, commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art.
The guests could obtain a mermaid only by "snapping a photo of their first bite, lick, taste", operating as a commentary on "the public consumption of brown bodies".
[35] On 21 March 2013, she held her first United States solo exhibition, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey at Nasher Museum of Art.
[36] The exhibition Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey subsequently traveled to the Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in October 2013.
[41] In September 2019, four female bronze sculptures by Mutu, "Seated I, II, III, and IV", were placed to occupy the empty niches always intended to house free-standing sculpture in the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the first instillation and exhibition ("The New Ones Will Free Us" September 9 – Fall 2020) of what will be an annual commission meant to feature work by contemporary artists.
[49][50] Curated by Erin K. Murphy, Visibilities not only kicks off Artpace's 25th anniversary celebration, but also highlights past artists from their International Artist-in-Residency program, such as Mutu who was a resident there in Fall of 2004.
[51] Mutu's 12-panel series Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors,[52] made up of collaged digital prints, was exhibited in the Hudson Showroom.
to "advance radical change through the power of art and activism, particularly supporting artists, initiatives and institutions from Africa and its Diaspora that celebrate freedom of creative expression.