Wangechi Mutu is a kenyan artist and sculptor born on 22 June 1972 but is lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
She was educated at Loreto Convent Msongari and later she studied at the United World College of the Atlantic, Wales. Wangechi later moved to New York in the 1990s, focusing on Fine Arts and Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and Parsons School of Art and Design.
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In 1996, Wangechi earned a BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Science and in the year 2000, she received a master’s degree in sculpture from Yale University. She designs her work in way that the center often places a performing or posed figure and she uses this as a means to focus the eye and to unlock dialogue about perception in both personal and political realms.
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| Tree Girl bronze on a Turkana headrest (Art work by Mutu studio) |
Wangechi’s work has received great recognition and is currently displayed in museums all over the world. Her first solo exhibition at a major North American museum opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario in March 2010. Her first U.S. solo exhibition, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey in the United States opened at Nasher Museum of Art on 21 March 2013.
She has held recent one-person shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Staatlichen Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Wiels Contemporary Art Center, Brussels; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina; the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Illinois; and Miami Art Museum.
In February 2010, Wangechi was honoured by Deutsche Bank as their first “Artist of the Year”. The prize included a solo exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. Titled My Dirty Little Heaven, the show travelled in June 2010 to the Wiels Center for Contemporary Art in Forest, Belgium.
She was awarded the BlackStar Film Festival Audience Award for Favorite Experimental Film in Philadelphia, PA for her film “The End of Eating Everything”, and also the Brooklyn Museum Artist of the Year, Brooklyn, NY in 2013.
She was also awarded the 2014 United States Artist Grant.
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In 2015, Wangechi participated in the The 56th Venice Biennale’s International Art Exhibition titled “All The World’s Futures”, curated by Okwui Enwezor at the Giardini and the Arsenale venues.
In 2016, her film The End of Carrying All was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX.The film features Wangechi herself crossing a landscape with a basket filling up with consumer goods as the landscape changes, ending with a volcanic eruption.
