Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu (born 1972) is a Kenyan American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work.

Born in Kenya, she has lived and established her career in New York City for more than twenty 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), and later studied at the United World College of the Atlantic, Wales (I.B., 1991).

Mutu moved to New York in the 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.

Mutu's work crosses a variety of mediums, including collage, video, performance, and sculpture, and investigates themes of gender, race, and colonialism.

Her 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.

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.

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 perfection as it is presented in society and instead embrace their own imperfections and become more accepting of the flaws of others as well.

In 2006, Mutu and British architect David Adjaye collaborated on a project.

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.

Furs and bullet holes adorned the walls while wine bottles dangled in a careless chandelier-like form above the stained table.

The table's multiple legs resembled thick femurs with visibly delicate tibias, and the whole space had a pungent aroma.

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".

This vicious hunger was seen as a connection between images of The Last Supper, the climate of the current art-buying world, and the war in Iraq.

It is a performance video in which a woman uses a panga [a type of machete] to chop up a log but the wood is impossible to sever.

The action serves to emphasize Africa's history of being cut up into portions by colonial forces.

The work was shot in a town in Presidio, Texas, a town with racial tension and violence since it sits on the U.S./Mexican border, uprooting energy from the site

Another installation of Mutu, Suspended Playtime (2008) is a series of bundles of garbage bags, wrapped in gold twine as if suspended in spiders' webs, all suspended from the ceiling over the viewer.

The installation makes reference to the common use of garbage bags as improvised balls and other playthings by African children.

As a visual artist, Mutu takes inspiration from fashion and travel magazines, pornography, ethnography, and mechanics.

In 2013, at the Nasher Museum of Art, Mutu showed her sketchbook drawings for the first time ever in her retrospective exhibition, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey.

The books consisted of strangely attractive, yet grotesque human figures fused with animals, plants, or machines.

In 2013, Wangechi Mutu's first-ever animated video, The End of Eating Everything, was created in collaboration with recording artist Santigold, commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art.

The video was animated by Awesome + Modest.

In 2014, Mutu's art was on display at an exhibition entitled Nguva na Nyoka, at Victoria Miro Gallery in London.

At the exhibition's opening night, Mutu displayed a performance piece, wherein guests were encouraged to consume custom-made Wangechi Mutu chocolate mermaids.

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.

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. Criticism, curiosity, and voyeurism lead me along, as I look at things I find hard to view – things that are sometimes distasteful or unethical".

Mutu frequently uses "grotesque" textures in her artwork and has cited her mother's medical books on tropical diseases as an inspiration, stating that there is "nothing more insanely visually interesting and repulsive than a body infected with tropical disease; these are diseases that grow and fester and become larger than the being that they have infected, almost."

Mutu is able to enact personal and cultural transfigurations by transitioning from painting to sculpture and back again.

Mutu says " This transition was so powerful because I used my mind as an object maker – I think I always painted like a sculptor. " In Mutu's collage work she began to respond to Western advertisement and beauty standards: "I began an ongoing critique and an intellectual an actual vandalization of those images, which were violating me by rendering me invisible. "

Mutu has exhibited sculptural installations.