Wangechi Mutu

A practice across materials

Wangechi Mutu was born in Nairobi in 1972 and later earned an MFA at Yale. Paper and photographic fragments became important to her early practice, but they never defined its outer limits. The New Museum’s 2023 survey placed collage beside drawing, film and sculpture, allowing viewers to follow changes in how she assembled figures.

In a collage, the seam between unlike fragments can remain perceptible. In Mutu’s sculpture, that way of thinking survives even when there is no paper. Parts of a body may merge with botanical or engineered forms. The shift into three dimensions gives the assembled figure a physical position in relation to the people looking at it.

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Commissions in different settings

The New Museum commissioned Yo Mama for its 2003 exhibition on Fela Kuti. It brought the work back into view in Intertwined twenty years later. The later presentation asked a different question: how did a work first shown around another artist’s legacy connect to Mutu’s developing use of the body?

The Metropolitan Museum’s 2019 facade project brought four seated bronzes to niches at its Fifth Avenue entrance. Mutu used a figure associated with architectural support and gave it a posture that carried no architectural load. The public setting mattered because the sculptures met people before they entered the galleries.

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What a survey reveals

Intertwined set works made with soil and wood beside cast bronzes and earlier works on paper. That selection makes it possible to follow a line of inquiry across materials without treating the later bronzes as the endpoint. Each installation offers a separate way to ask what a figure can do in the space around it.

Sources for this section: [3]