Wangechi Mutu: Artistic Works and Style, Exhibitions and Awards

Wangechi Mutu
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Wangechi Mutu
Introduction
Born on 22nd June 1972, in Nairobi, Kenya, Wangechi Mutu has grown to become of the most celebrated artist from Africa (The Africa Channel, 2016). She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York where she lives and works. Mutu’s works continue to receive global acclaim and is actually considered as one of the best contemporary African artists of her generation. After receiving her basic education in Kenya at Loreto Convent Msongari, she later moved to Wales in 1991 for her college education at the United World College of the Atlantic. Since she had an interest in Anthropology and Fine Arts, Mutu later moved to the US in the in the mid 1990’s and enrolled at the Parsons School of Art and Design and the New School for Social Research (The Africa Channel, 2016). The two institutions are based in New York and Mutu found a perfect opportunity to simultaneously study Fine Arts and Anthropology. In 1996, Mutu earned a BFA in the Advancement of Art and Science from Cooper Union. This formed the foundation of her future career in art. Her interest in both art and sculpture influenced her decision to enroll at Yale University for a Masters degree in sculpture. She completed her Master’s program in 2000 and graduated the same year with a Masters degree in sculpture (The Africa Channel, 2016). After completing her Master’s degree, Mutu had equipped herself had the necessary knowledge and skills to launch her illustrious career in art. This paper will highlight Wangechi Mutu’s artistic works, style as well as influences.
Artistic Works and Style
Mutu’s works range from videos, performances installations, collages, paintings, works on paper and sculptures (The Africa Channel, 2016). Her ability to use a variety of mediums to communicate her message is a clear indication of her versatility and diversity when it comes to art. Mutu is fond of creating provocative juxtapositions of a woman’s body using assemblage and collage strategies. Most of her works explore three major themes that include sexual identity, colonialism, race and gender. She has the ability to create different formations of the body using painted elements, hand drawn elements, images from science fiction as well as fragments from automotive schematics, African art books, pornography magazines, fashion magazines as well as travel magazines (The Africa Channel, 2016). Mutu’s works are characterized by feelings of worldliness and familiarity that she creates by mixing abstract patterns and photo based collage elements. Her ability to bring out different feelings in a single piece of art is what makes her works to be very attractive and interesting.
Mutu’s works are very investigative, thought provoking, and always leaves her audience with a mixture of feelings (Miro, 2016). The pieces of art have the ability to unlock perception dialogue in both political and personal contexts. She likes to interrogate social issues in her works as she tries to find out how personal and political realism define the social contract. In addition that, Mutu tries to find out how the human race has been represented in the society and the various identity issues that people face on a daily basis. Her works advocate for identity awareness and the need for multiple consciousness (Miro, 2016). The artist believes that the imagination of all human beings is bound by common rules that are supposed to be remade. She comes up with new images after dismantling the old tropes in a creative manner in her attempts to reorganize the reality of self-perception. She reorganizes reality to help her audience to have the most realistic images of them.
Mutu demonstrates how the understanding, survival and experiences of a person are influenced in great way by their physical body and highlights the complications of being African by using sculpture, videos, collage, and paintings and through performance (Miro, 2016). She has a tendency of using hybrid- species and cyborgs as characters in most of her works. The characters in her works are normally well positioned, enhanced or altered depending on the message that she want to communicate through her work. The position of characters may imply the inherent vulnerability of the female gender, unknowablesnees or power. She questions the role of each person in; the health of the ailing planet, awareness of multi-cultural perspectives, the well-being fellow human and self-determination. In her works, Mutu experiments with painting on new surfaces, animation and visceral environmental elements that are infused in the space (Miro, 2016)
When representing the African subject, Mutu highlights subjects relating to shared history, as well as borders and margins in a bolder and complex manner. She likes highlighting the salient spots of shared history when representing the African subject (Miro, 2016). In addition to that, she presents herself as a perpetual outsider that is attracted by most what she sees whenever she travels to foreign destinations. She highlights social issues in the contemporary world especially those related to misrepresentation of women and violence against women. Some of the most notable features in most of her paintings include images of half humans and half animals, machine gears and gun shafts sprouting from joints and sockets as mutant appendices, eruption of buboes as skin and writhing female forms. The features highlight the mind wrought and other perversions of the body that lead to women oppression (Miro, 2016).
The most interesting thing about Mutu is that most of the figures she creates are part human, part animal, part machine and take...