Wangechi Mutu is a visual artist born in Nairobi, Kenya who currently works in both Nairobi and New York. Mutu is inspired by nature and typically creates artwork of women, animals, and plants, with her own dash of abstraction. She went to an all-girls school when getting her education and says that it really impacted her art style. A lot of her art explores the natural imperfections of women and neglects stereotypes, which adds to the earthy ambiance of the artwork. Currently, she makes sculptures and paintings, but when she first applied to art school, her main medium was collage since it was the most accessible and simple way to create a lot of art, and as she could use a mix of materials. Some of her artwork combines women and a type of animal to make a creature that is a hybrid of both. She states that there are times we admire animals for their speed or power and to see those traits embedded in a woman can be uplifting and empowering.
Another interesting aspect of her life she pulls ideas from are the tropical diseases she’s experienced. “Although they may be hideous to look at, there is lots of fantastic detail within them,” she says. Mutu was introduced to them at a young age and grew up around them as her mother was a nurse.
Mutu strongly believes in a studio that isn’t just a room, but a space that reflects an extra part of your brain: an area where you can create something completely different from what you could anywhere else. In her studio, Mutu furnishes the walls with pictures of old Africa and current events as well.
Many of her art pieces have been displayed in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. She once did a project where she created sculptures to place on the outside of the museum. In this project, she considered how women have been represented in art in many different cultures and time periods and discovered a theme. Specifically, in old Greek and African sculptures, women were often carved into a position of support, or shown holding up a building, a throne, a child, or even a bowl on top of the head. Mutu found that this ubiquitous representation of women was problematic and wanted to shift that ancient ideology. To do this, she created four bronze sculptures of women in active poses to place outside the museum. They were protected with lively-looking coils around them. The sculptures have rounded edges and are shaped to fit different kinds of traditional lip and ear plates from Ethiopian and Sudanese cultures (when women wear these, it typically means that they are of high status). The main objective Mutu had when making these sculptures was to present women regally, focused, and free. Rather than being stuck in a secondary, weighted position of holding someone else up, they were able to “be where they need to be and say what they want to say.”
Nowadays, Mutu is experimenting with photography and film to further extend her art. Her artwork has been exhibited worldwide and continues to reach out to different perspectives and into new themes.
