Wangechi Mutu

Biography

The niches on the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had always been meant for free-standing statues, but they stood empty. In September 2019 sculptures were placed in them for the first time: four bronze female figures by Wangechi Mutu, “The Seated I–IV”, under the collective title “The NewOnes, will free Us”. Their source, Mutu said, was the caryatid. She explained that in Greek architecture women carry the building on themselves, while in African sculpture they often kneel or hold up the king’s seat, and she wanted to lift them higher. The display was due to close in January 2020, was extended until the autumn because of the pandemic, and the museum later bought two of the figures for its own collection.

It was the first commission in a new annual programme the museum had set up for contemporary artists.

Mutu was born on 22 June 1972 in Nairobi. She went to the Loreto Convent Msongari school, at sixteen left for Wales, for the United World College of the Atlantic, and in 1991 gained the International Baccalaureate there. In the 1990s she moved to New York, studied fine art and anthropology at the New School for Social Research and at Parsons, graduated from Cooper Union in 1996, and in 2000 took a master’s degree in sculpture at the Yale School of Art. Straight after Yale she began to be included in major international exhibitions and biennials.

She takes the material for her collages from fashion and travel magazines, pornography, ethnographic albums, technical manuals and old medical books on tropical diseases. She began by answering Western advertising and its standards of beauty: in her words, it was a critique and a genuine act of vandalism against the pictures that made her invisible. The bodies of her heroines grow into plants, animals and machines, and she deliberately chooses repellent textures. Critics call these figures grotesque; Mutu prefers the word “disabled” and says they show the historical tensions that a black woman carries within her. The “Pinup” series (2001), six sheets of watercolour and collage made just after Yale, relates to the civil war in Sierra Leone, where many women were mutilated; it is now in the Studio Museum in Harlem. The large diptych “Yo Mama” (2003) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is dedicated to the Nigerian feminist Funmilayo Anikulapo-Kuti. To my mind, she supplied the key to all this herself: she says she has always painted like a sculptor, and moving from painting to three dimensions and back comes naturally to her.

In 2006, together with the architect David Adjaye, she turned the Salon 94 gallery’s townhouse on the Upper East Side into an underground banqueting hall, “Exhuming Gluttony: A Lover’s Requiem”: furs and bullet holes on the walls, wine bottles hanging like a chandelier over a stained table, table legs like thigh bones. In the same year, in Presidio, Texas, on the Mexican border, she shot the video “Cleaning Earth”, in which a woman hacks at a log with a machete and cannot cut through it. The installation “Suspended Playtime” (2008) is made of balls of rubbish bags bound with gold string, the kind of balls African children make for themselves.

On 23 February 2010 Deutsche Bank named her its first “Artist of the Year”, and her exhibition “My Dirty Little Heaven” was shown at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, moving in the summer to the Wiels centre in Brussels. In March of the same year the Art Gallery of Ontario opened her first solo exhibition at a major North American museum. Her first American retrospective, “A Fantastic Journey”, was shown in March 2013 by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and moved in the autumn to the Brooklyn Museum; the exhibition was the first to show her sketchbooks. Her first animated film, “The End of Eating Everything” (2013), with the singer Santigold, was also made for the Nasher. That same year she took part in the main project of the 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.

Since 2015 Mutu has divided her time between studios in New York and Nairobi; a single root, she says, does not mean a plant will stand straight, while roots in different places give strength. In 2014 she founded the charity Africa’s Out! in Brooklyn to support artists from Africa and the diaspora. Sculpture takes up more and more of her work: the “Sentinel” series (from 2016) in clay, wood and found objects; the bronze “Water Woman” (2017), in the form of a nguva, the half-woman, half-sea-creature of East African lore, for the sculpture park of The Contemporary Austin; the almost five-metre “MamaRay” (2020) for the Nasher. In 2023 the New Museum in New York showed about 115 of her works in the retrospective “Intertwined”. Her work is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and Tate Modern in London.