Wangechi Mutu
Wangechi Mutu
b. 1972, Nairobi
lives in Nairobi and New York
Wangechi Mutu’s practice includes collage-paintings, videos, sculptures, and performances. The main themes of Mutu’s work derive from her experiences living and attending schools in different countries including Kenya, Wales, and the United States. For Mutu, immigration is an experience full of re-definition and re-creation, and in her work it manifests through her use of fracture and re-assemblage, both practical and psychological. Her work relies on her insight into the complicated exchanges and contributions that Africa and Africans have made to the United States the vast expense of then exporting those contributions back to Africa and the rest of the world. Mutu’s work is bound to an understanding of the historical use and misuse of the female subject, gender imbalance, cultural constructs, and the environment. A new set of works, The NewOnes, will free Us, was commissioned in 2019 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to occupy the long-vacant niches of the museum’s facade. Mutu’s work has been exhibited worldwide in galleries and institutions such as the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Miami Art Museum (now Pérez Art Museum Miami); Tate Modern, London; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Tate Modern, among others. Mutu earned a BFA from Cooper Union, New York (1996), and an MFA in sculpture from Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut (2000).
Wangechi Mutu, Water Woman, 2017. Bronze, 36 x 65 x 70 inches. Installation view, The Contemporary Austin – Laguna Gloria, Austin, Texas, 2017. Artwork © WANGECHI MUTU. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Image courtesy The Contemporary Austin. Photograph by Brian Fitzsimmons