27 Facts About Wangechi Mutu

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

Wangechi 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.

Wangechi Mutu moved to New York in the late 1990s, focusing on Fine Arts and Anthropology at The New School for Social Research, and Parsons School of Art and Design.

Wangechi Mutu 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.

Wangechi 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.

Wangechi Mutu uses female subjectivity to examine other social and political issues as well; however, her aim is to always retain focus on female figures, identities, and experiences, in order to bring them to the forefront.

Many of Wangechi 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.

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

The themes and narratives of Wangechi Mutu's work create a visual representation of certain social, political, and physical realities of the world today.

Wangechi Mutu's work has been called "firmly Africanfuturist and Afrofuturist", as exemplified in her work, including one of her pieces titled The End of Eating Everything.

For critics, Wangechi Mutu's imagined alternate realities for Africa through the medium of science fiction definitively situated Wangechi Mutu in the genre of Afrofuturism.

Wangechi Mutu uses Afrofuturism to explore themes of alienation, which relates to feminism, colonialism, materiality, and disability.

Wangechi Mutu wanted to showcase the African American women as being on top of a pedestal to express a reclaim of black female power.

Wangechi Mutu considers the black female experience in her pieces through her inspiration from female forms that showcase power in art history.

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

For Performa 17, Wangechi Mutu designed a set that was part arena and part white cube gallery.

In 2019, Wangechi Mutu created bronze statues for the exterior niches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 2020 Wangechi Mutu completed her large bronze sculpture, MamaRay, commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

The film depicts Wangechi Mutu crossing a landscape with a basket filling up with consumer goods as the landscape changes, ending with a volcanic eruption.

In September 2019, four female bronze sculptures by Wangechi Mutu, "Seated I, II, III, and IV", were placed to occupy the empty niches always intended to house free-standing sculpture in the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the first instillation and exhibition of what will be an annual commission meant to feature work by contemporary artists.

Wangechi Mutu has described the bronze statues as having been inspired by caryatids.

In January 2020, Wangechi Mutu was part of Artpace's exhibit entitled Visibilities: Intrepid Women of Artpace.

Wangechi Mutu's work was included in the Spirit in the Land exhibition and accompanying publication at the Nasher Museum of Art, in 2023, which later traveled to the Perez Art Museum Miami in 2024.

Wangechi Mutu's work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Perez Art Museum Miami, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; the Brooklyn Museum; Tate Modern in London.

On 23 February 2010, Wangechi Mutu was honoured by Deutsche Bank as its first "Artist of the Year".

In 2013, Wangechi Mutu was awarded the BlackStar Film Festival Audience Award for Favorite Experimental Film in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for her film The End of Eating Everything, as well as the Brooklyn Museum Artist of the Year, Brooklyn, New York.

In 2014, Wangechi Mutu won the United States Artist Grant and in 2017, she was honored with the International Artist Award given by Anderson Ranch Arts Center.