Wangechi Mutu is a multidisciplinary artist that uses her Kenyan background as the jumping-off place for her collages, sculptures, videos, and installations. Her work explores gender, race, war, globalization, colonization, and the black female body. At the Venice Biennale Arte 2015, her work was used to express her apocalyptic view of consumerism with her sculpture, She’s Got the Whole World in Her, her video, The End of Carrying All, and her collage Forbidden Fruit Picker. Through this and her other work, we can see how she turns her females into fierce beings, powerful and mysterious. It is her opinion that we need female leaders to heal this aggressive world created by men. I couldn’t agree more.

In 2019, the Metropolitan Museum commissioned Mutu to create four sculptures for the niches in the historic facade; they had remained empty since 1902. The New Ones Will Free Us represents the powerful women—no longer in the caryatid’s historical role, but as leaders and guardians challenging our history of Eurocentrism and patriarchy. Two decades of research into the relationship between power, culture, and representation led to The Seated. Mutu won the 2019 Time list of 28 Outstanding Women for this achievement.

The End of Eating Everything is Mutu’s first video and collaboration with Santigold. She wanted to prove that her collages could exist in time and space. She used stop-motion drawings to represent the earth as a tumor-like living organism with excessive materialism issues and the problems created from conspicuous over-consumerism. The film combines collage, performance, and sculpture. (See this video here).

Being known for her collages and films in the early 2000s, Mutu moved into her “otherworldly superhero beings,” agglomerations of the human female with the earth’s plants and animals, “that could redeem us from our bullshit and our small-minded problems that hurt us so tremendously,” as Mutu describes them. Sculptures, like Water Woman and Crocodylus, feel calm and basic, as if we already found them in nature. In her Nairobi studio, Mutu made her latest sculptures, She Walks and her Sentinels, using materials gathered from there. They seem non-confrontational but let us know they are worthy of loving, leading, and guarding “the earth they are made from.”

Only Wangechi Mutu could produce this oeuvre. Her binary works result from her intertwined life—she grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, with notable contrasts of everything…rich and poor, rural, and urban that exists in the same place in the present moment. Her adult life began as a prodigal daughter by moving to New York at only 19 years of age to study art. She incorporates her global vision by acknowledging both traditional and contemporary values as citizens of both America and Africa.

Including all experiences is crucial to telling the whole story—similarly to the Sentinels, this artist, and all great artists. Artwork is the consummation of each artist’s life experiences, not a solo encounter. Through audience participation, we relate through empathy and by recognizing the artist’s authenticity, we recognize, or search for, our own.

Check out Wangechi Mutu and her work on Brilliant Ideas and on Art 21.  To see more of her work, check out her galleries, Victoria Miro, Gladstone Gallery, Lehmann Maupin, and Vielmetter in Los Angeles.

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