Wangechi Mutu: A Breathtaking Installation at the New Museum
Updated: Aug 12, 2023
Wherein I live out another life's dream visiting a dear friend's groundbreaking show, "Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined" at the New Museum.
March Enters Like A Lion
Curated by Vivian Crockett and Margo Norton, the New Museum's show covers the depth and breadth of Wangechi Mutu's (b. 1972, Nairobi) artistic practice with a breathtaking multidisplinary display of other-worldy and yet all too familiar visual art.
To experience a collection of Wangechi Mutu's works spanning decades of art creation and co-creation in a multilevel show unlike any other covering her work.
To experience a singular piece by Wangechi Mutu is to walk away with the impression that you witnessed a distillation of a master’s understanding of visual art, history and culture throughout the diaspora. As co-curator of the exhibition, Vivian Crockett, describes Mutu’s pieces as “deeply layered and deeply researched.”
The show at the New Museum follows the “nonlinear progression” of her career as themes, methods, and studies repeat throughout her career. As Crockett puts it, Mutu’s works are “[f]antastical renderings” that help the viewer “imagine different worlds, different experiences.”
The Seated I, pictured above, was one of four sculptures titled “The NewOnes, Will Free Us” that was displayed on the facade of the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Met in 2019. The baskets containing figures plopped down throughout the exhibition floor recall intricately woven and rendered in bronze are oversized Kikapú baskets, sold by artisans in Kenya.
I had to find another place where they hadn’t perceived Black people to be, and that was on a spaceship.
- George Clinton
I experienced one of the Top 10 Museum Exhibitions of 2023. No big deal.
Don't believe me? Take it from one critic who wrote: "This show, which should well make lots of Top 10 lists of the year, was organized by Vivian Crockett and Margot Norton, assisted by Ian Wallace. It reveals Mutu to be one of the best artists of her generation, using her innate versatility to demonstrate diversity as essential to live, real or imagined.”
Visualizing new spaces for Black bodies is Afrodfuturist by nature. Fellow afroargonaut George Clinton decades before Mutu’s earliest piece took Black bodies interterrestrial with the Mothership, “I had to find another place where they hadn’t perceived Black people to be, and that was on a spaceship.”
* Sunny is a Yale law reject whose sole purpose in applying was to be able to easily attend the lectures and open studios held by the members of the university’s hallowed (to her) MFA program. To learn about African art, the history of its study in the United States (outside of storied HBCUs like Howard) invariably covers work of Yale art historians. So, in short, it strikes the author as a place to want to check out in one’s academic career.
Reflecting the Divine
A fellow boarding school graduate, Mutu earned her BFA from Cooper Union before attending the renowned MFA program at Yale.* This isn’t Mutu’s first time exhibiting in the New Museum. In 2003 her work was featured on a show that celebrated the life of Fela** and was to center on the artist. Mutu, instead, focused on Fela Kuti’s mother, Chief Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, and the history and legacy of her life and death during Fela’s life. An educator, political campaigner, suffragist, and women's rights activist, it is no surprise then that Fela’s music would carry heavy themes of struggle for equality and pushback against the status quo. The piece titled “Yo Mama” (2003) is large, exaggerated, and the subject of the magnet I picked up in the museum shop after touring the exhibition a second time.
** Fun fact: I incorporated Fela lyrics into a personal essay in high school. Given the timing (this is pre-Questlove promotion and Broadway musical childhood type love of afrodiasporadic music. From Fela to Celia Cruz, on to Buena Vista Social Club and back to George Clinton with a frequent dip into D.C. disco with BYB and Chuck Brown headlining the playlist of my life.
There are Black people in the future.
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