Wangechi Mutu

The link was not copied. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born artist, based in Brooklyn, New York, best known for her large-scale collages composed of images from women’s magazines, ethnographic periodicals, and pornography. After finishing her primary education in Kenya and the UK, Mutu moved to the United States in 2000 to study art at Cooper Union and completed her MFA at the Yale School of Art. While the artist’s main body of work consists of collages, she has also created paintings, videos, sculptures, and installations. Her work almost always features multiracial and multiethnic women. The faces of Mutu’s cyborgian figures tend to be moulded out of a variety of photographic representations. While eyes become eyes and noses turn into noses, the figure’s body can be composed of flowers, animal parts, or wounds and gashes. Works such as Misguided Little Unforgivable Hierarchies (2005) exemplify Mutu’s insidious use of pornographic imagery. The dismembered bodies removed from their hyper-sexual context form the faces and bodies of three female figures. This subliminal and disjointed depiction of the female body and sexuality becomes representative of bodies dismembered by war and violence. Other works, such as the video The End of Eating Everything (2013), show the artist’s inclination toward depicting racially and gender ambiguous figures in hyperbolic scenarios, strongly criticizing over-consumption. The cyborg-like figure in the video floats through space, her mouth agape, devouring everything around her, while her belly swells to grotesque proportions. For the diptych Yo Mama (2003), the artist took inspiration from the Nigerian political activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, represented as the biblical Eve in the collage. The figure can be seen taking charge of her destiny by decapitating the serpent and stabbing her with a stiletto. She will not conform, will not be colonized, and fights for her place in paradise. New York (Studio Mus. Harlem): Magnificent Monkey-Ass Lies (2004, paint, ink, collage, mixed media on Mylar) Kaitano, Chiwoniso: ‘The Afrofuturism of Wangechi Mutu’, The Guardian , 13 Nov 2013. Schoomaker, Trevor: Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey , exhibition catalogue, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham (NC), 2013. ‘The Fantastic, Feminine and Futuristic Work of Wangechi Mutu’, Arts Observer , 20 March 2014. ‘“They Eat Because You Grow the Food”: Wangechi Mutu’s Words of Wisdom for Struggling Artists’, Artspace , 13 Jan 2016.