About Wangechi Mutu
Born in Nairobi, Kenya and living in New York since the early 1990s, Wangechi Mutu is best known for large-scale collages depicting female figures in lush, otherworldly landscapes. Her work explores issues of gender, race, war, globalization, colonialism and the eroticization of the black female body. She often combines found materials and magazine cutouts with sculpture and painted imagery, sampling from sources as diverse as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, and science fiction. Her retrospective, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, was presented at Northwestern’s May and Leigh Block Museum of Art September 19 – December 7, 2014.
Wangechi Mutu at Northwestern
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Art in Eastern Africa by
"This book, initiated in Africa, is the first in a series in bringing together leading artists, designers and scholars from the East Africa region, illustrating how visually creative people in Eastern Africa expressed themselves in the past through art and artefacts, and how some contemporary artists and designers respond to the world within and beyond Africa. A major education initiative, the book is edited by Marion Arnold, who has written extensively on Southern African art and has many years of university-level teaching experience."--BOOK JACKET.
ISBN: 9789987449132Publication Date: 2007-01-01
Earth Matters by
Featuring more than 100 extraordinary works of art from 1800 to the present, Earth Matters reveals how African individuals and communities have visually mediated their most poignant relationships with the land--whether it be to earth as a sacred or medicinal material, as something uncovered by mining or claimed by burial, as a surface to be interpreted and turned to for inspiration, or as an environment to be protected. Both internationally recognized and emerging contemporary artists are represented, from the continent and diaspora, including El Anatsui, Ghada Amer, Sammy Baloji, Ingrid Mwangi and William Kentridge. Highlights include a pair of rare Yoruba onile figures, a one-of-a-kind Punu reliquary from Gabon, and 3 bocio figures from the personal collection of legendary French dealer Jacques Kerchache. The text includes statements by contemporary African artists including Wangechi Mutu, Clive van den Berg, Allan de Souza, and George Osodi. National Museum of African Art curator Karen E. Milbourne explores how diverse African concepts of healing, the sacred, identity, memory, history, and environmental sustainability have all been formed in relation to the land in this pioneering scholarly study.
ISBN: 9781580933704Publication Date: 2013-11-12- Lamu Fort Environmental Museum [poster] by Black and white portrait painting of a man in a white kanzu (robe) and a white Muslim hat on his head. On the left are stripes of white and green paint with a little band of green paint on the hat. An artistic text in green and black paint on the man's white robe on lower part of poster reads: Lamu Fort Environmental Museum.Publication Date: 1992
Looking Both Ways by
"Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora" considers the work of artists from North, South, East and West Africa who live and work in Western countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States. As its title indicates, "Looking Both Ways" refers to the artists' practice of looking at the psychic terrain between Africa and the West, a terrain of shifting physical contexts, aesthetic ambitions and expressions. It examines the relationship between physical contexts, emotional geographies, ambition, and freedom of expression while focusing on the increasing globalization of the African Diaspora. "Looking Both Ways" is not a survey, but rather an intimate consideration of the work of twelve artists: Fernando Alvim, Ghada Amer, Oladélé Bamgboyé, Allan deSouza, Kendell Geers, Moshekwa Langa, Hassan Musa, N'Dilo Mutima, Wangechi Mutu, Ingrid Mwangi, Zineb Sedira and Yinka Shonibare.
ISBN: 905349443XPublication Date: 2004-03-02- Solch ungeahnte Tiefen = This undreamt descent by
Contains no title page, title from slipcase.
Leaves are unbound and unnumbered, in the form of oversize postcards; 21 are images, the rest are text.
Published on the occasion of an exhibition held at Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, July 14 - September 30, 2012.
Parallel text in German and English.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 9783869843698Publication Date: 2011
- Wangechi Mutu by
Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Feb. 2-Apr. 22, 2012.
Text in French and English.
ISBN: 9782551251438Publication Date: 2012
Wangechi Mutu by
This richly illustrated full-color catalog accompanies the first major solo museum exhibition and most comprehensive survey of the artist Wangechi Mutu's work, on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from March 21, 2013, through July 21, 2013, before traveling to the Brooklyn Museum. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1972, and now based in Brooklyn, Mutu renders the complex global sensibility of the early twenty-first century through a distinctly hybrid aesthetic. She combines found materials and magazine cutouts with sculpture and painted imagery, sampling from sources and phenomena as diverse as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, and science fiction. In her work, Mutu marries poetic symbolism with sociopolitical critique to explore issues of gender, race, war, colonialism, and, particularly, the exoticization of the black female body. The many images included in Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey highlight the most important and iconic works that Mutu has created since the mid-1990s, as well as portray new collages, drawings, videos, and site-specific installations. The catalog also offers an intimate look into her sketchbooks and includes an interview with the artist conducted by the exhibition's curator, Trevor Schoonmaker. Essays by Schoonmaker, the art historian Kristine Stiles, and the critic, musician, and producer Greg Tate are paired with an illustrated chronology of Mutu's work. Publication of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
ISBN: 9780938989363Publication Date: 2013-06-18
Wangechi Mutu by
"Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body," states Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu, the subject of this highly anticipated first monograph. In recent years Mutu's work has become increasingly sought-after in the international art world, making high-profile appearances at the important art fairs and auctions. What makes her interesting, however, is her fierce and contemporary use of the well-worn medium of collage. Mutu deals with female and cultural identity in large-scale figurative pieces constructed from found and drawn imagery. Her figures are freakish and erotic hybrids of the primitive, contemporary and post-human. These sometimes garish, diseased, ravaged and distorted figures are made from seductive or silly materials like glossy fashion magazine pictures, glitter or fun fur. They refer to colonial history, contemporary African politics, the history of art and fashion--in often quite irreverent ways. Mutu's own diverse history--she has studied both anthropology and sculpture and has lived in Nairobi, Wales, New York and New Haven, where she received her MFA from Yale University in 2001--seems a likely source for her manifold concerns. This volume surveys Mutu's work to date.
ISBN: 9788862080217Publication Date: 2008-05-01
Wangechi Mutu: My Dirty Little Heaven by
Kenyan sculptor and anthropologist Wangechi Mutu (born 1972) mines ethnographic photography, fashion, sport, porn and popular-science publications such as "National Geographic" to develop her fierce critique of the deformation of the female body by consumerism in elegant, tapering spirals of collage and drawing. Mutu refers to her hybrid women as "warrior women" whom she augments and contorts in prosthetic treatments. Often indefinably horrific, Mutu's complexly patterned works are often pitched between decorative abstraction and mutant figuration, and as Klaus Ottman points out in an essay included here, her hybrid creatures evoke "the genocidal horrors inflicted by African rebels in Sierra Leone and Sudanese soldiers in Darfur while also recalling the imaginative heads of Archimboldo; the erotic contortions of Egon Schiele; and the photomontages of Hannah Höch." Mutu's work, presented here in over 130 color images, has advanced a fresh treatment of black female identity, consumer culture and postcolonialism.
ISBN: 9783775727013Publication Date: 2010-11-30
Yo-n-i by
Catalog of an exhibition held at Victoria Miro 16, Nov. 24, 2007-Jan. 19, 2008.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 9780955456435Publication Date: 2008
