© Mario Lazzaroni
Wangechi Mutu
USA Jeanne and Michael Klein Fellow (Brooklyn, NY)
Visual Arts
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born, New York based Artist and Activist whose work contains a form of personal poetic cultural criticism that engages the complexities of the daily issues, current affairs, and diverse environments that affect not only all humans, but more specifically the disempowered. Her inventive and meticulous use of materials matched with the elegant and perhaps horrific figures are found lurking in worlds filled with hybrids. Composites themselves, they're entrapped between consciousness and dreamscapes, silences and cacophony, seemingly alive, though somewhere beyond the memory of death; still real and yet not. These characters are avatars that reveal their inherent vulnerability in spite of their dynamic potency, which comes from a malleability the Artist has made of them. The figures are, after-all, regenerated and intervene with reality to find and address the unfairness of this planet's realities.
Wangechi Mutu is the recipient of the United States Artist Grant (2014), the Brooklyn Museum's Artist of the Year Award (2013), and was honored as Deutsche Bank's first Artist of the Year (2010). She has exhibited at major institutions including 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.
