Wangechi Mutu
Renowned for her figurative work across mediums, Mutu is committed to reshaping the narratives of womanhood; by doing so, she challenges Western culture’s racist and misogynistic tenets. In her collages, sculptures, videos, and performances the figure of the woman is depicted with the complexity and profundity of a timeless archetype. Clichéd images of mothers, virgins, and goddesses provide Mutu with potent source material that she reconfigures to make space for agency, multitude, and contradictions. As the artist explained the origin of her collage-making practice, “I took these idealized stereotyped images of women and Eden-like ‘tropical’ images of Africa to create other images, tension-charged, potent, because they were full of my own emotional upset at the original ones…I was taking apart the images of a world that refused to acknowledge me.” Her characters, however, do not merely stand in defiance of the confines of normative visions of Black femininity; for Mutu, it’s important that her figures carry “balance and a feeling of belonging within them” as they establish imaginary worlds of their own.
