WANGECHI MUTU

On view in the exhibition are three works from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody

‘Underground Hornship (2018); ‘Mwotaji (The Dreamer) (2016)’ and ‘Howl (2006)’. These works exemplify her artistic practice centered around issues of ritual, race, consumerism, and the politics of identity. East African mythology, Afro-surrealist elements of science fiction and fantasy, critiques of African and female stereotypes, and universal notions of power, race, and colonialism are all present in her work. Among Mutu’s best-known works are her magazine-based collages, begun in 2002 and continuing today, depicting grotesquely beautiful hybrids of female figures and animal parts with distorted lips, eyes, and heads, such as ‘Howl’ which appears to be a shrieking bird-like feminine fantasy gorgon creature—a site of both desire and disgust. 

‘Underground Hornship’ approximates an antler shed, the patina black with the tips of the horns in bronze. And finally, ‘Mwotaji (The Dreamer)’, a bronze female head with knots in her hair, that that lies resting peacefully on a Carrera marble support, reclaims the appropriated African masks that influenced a generation of modernist sculptors (most notably perhaps in direct reference to Constantin Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse). There is something of violence inherent in this decapitation, the head without its rightful body; but the features are calm, restful – and most importantly dreaming of futures perhaps not yet imagined.

Wangechi Mutu is a contemporary Kenyan artist noted for her work which engages issues of gender, race, art history, and personal identity. Creating complex collages, sculptures, and performances that draw from the aesthetics of traditional African crafts, Mutu engages in her own form of storytelling; her works document the contemporary myth-making of endangered cultural heritage. The almost science fiction-like nature of her imagery has placed her work within the realm of Afrofuturism, and her practice is often discussed as providing an alternate course of history for people of African descent. Born in 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya, she received her BFA from Cooper Union in 1996, and subsequently her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2000. In 2019, her exhibition The New Ones, will free Us, was featured as the inaugural Facade Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It consisted of four bronze sculptures. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.