Wangechi Mutu

Kenyan-American (born Nairobi), born 1972

BiographyWangechi (wa-geh-shee) Mutu (born, 1972) is a Kenyan-born American visual artist. While she is largely known for her collage, she works across media in painting, film, performance and sculpture. She moved to NYC in the mid-1990s to study art and anthropology at Cooper Union and sculpture at Yale University and today divides her time between Nairobi and NYC. To create her collages, she uses images (which also influence her work in other media) clipped from a wide range of popular magazines, including fashion, pornography, and National Geographic, as well as from books about traditional African art. She joins these disparate body parts with hand-drawn passages and pooled ink washes on nonabsorbent Mylar. The resulting figures resemble hybrids of human and machine, disease and power, seduction and violence. Mutu’s work largely aims to invert Western stereotypes of Africa as the “dark continent” and of women as helpless sexual objects. She also seeks to challenge gender constructs, notions of beauty and power and cultural trauma across her work. Her work is in more than 30 public collections, including SFMOMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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