Wangechi Mutu
Visual artist
She makes bodies, histories and imagined worlds meet in new forms.
- Theme
- Arts & Letters
Wangechi Mutu works across collage, sculpture, film and other media. Her art examines gender, race, power and the ways bodies are represented, often combining recognisable fragments into unfamiliar forms.
Her sculptures have occupied prominent public and museum spaces, including the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her contribution expands the language and visibility of contemporary art made from a Kenyan and diasporic perspective.
Life and work
Wangechi Mutu (; born 1972) is a Kenyan American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. As of 2023, Mutu, Born in Kenya, now splits her time between her studio there in Nairobi and her studio in Brooklyn, New York, where she has lived and worked for over 20 years. 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.
Mutu was born in 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya. She was educated at Loreto Convent Msongari (1978–1989). She left Nairobi at age 16 for high school, studying at the United World College of the Atlantic, in Wales (I.B., 1991). Mutu moved to New York in the late 1990s, focusing on Fine Arts and Anthropology at The New School for Social Research, and Parsons School of Art and Design. She earned a BFA degree from Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Science in 1996 and a master's degree in sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2000.
”It's the difference between a plant with one root and one with a network of roots. If a plant has just one root, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to stand straight and strong. The idea of having many roots, of having your feet really grounded in different places, is extremely empowering for me."
Mutu's work crosses a variety of mediums, including collage, bricolage, video, performance, and sculpture, and investigates themes of gender, race, and colonialism. 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.
Mutu's work, in part, centers on the violence and misrepresentation experienced by Black women in contemporary society. A recurring theme of Mutu's work is her various depictions of femininity. Mutu uses the feminine subject in her art, even when the figures are more or less unrecognizable, whether by using the form itself or the texture and patterns the figure is made from. Sometimes she uses cliche images of archetypal women; mothers, virgins, goddesses; as source material, reconfiguring them to create potent, charged images that reflect her own emotional agency, as well as the agency, multitudes, and contradictions of womanhood in general. Her use of otherworldly depictions for women, many times shown in a seemingly sexual or sensual pose, brings about discussion of the objectification of women. Specifically, Mutu addresses the hyper-objectification of black female bodies and has used an otherworldly nature to reiterate the fictitious nature of society's depictions of black women. Mutu uses female subjectivity to examine other social and political issues as well; however, her aim is to always retain focus on female figures, identities, and experiences, in order to bring them to the forefront.
Whether through delicate lined patterns or familiar feminine builds, Mutu's various ways of representing feminine qualities is said to enhance the strength of the images or the significance of the issues presented. Many of Mutu's artworks are known to be interpreted in contradictory ways, both seen as complicit to problematic society and as hopeful for future change in society. 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. 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. In these mangled forms, the struggle of women forced to comply with social expectations and historical oppressions is given physical form, portraying distinct inner turmoil.
This section adapts selected passages from Wangechi Mutu by Wikipedia contributors. It is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected passages; pronunciation guides, lists and reference markers omitted; punctuation and paragraph breaks adjusted. Photographs have separate licences.
