Wangechi Mutu’s fantastical creatures take over the New Museum

The full breadth of Wangechi Mutu’s artistic practice is being celebrated at a major solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York City. Comprised of over 100 works that range from painting and sculpture to collage, drawing and film, ‘Intertwined’ tracks the progression of Mutu’s practice since the mid-1990s and takes over the lobby and all three floors of the Sanaa-designed building. In addition to a ‘Screens Series’ programme of video works in the museum’s lower level, a new street-facing commission – a vinyl work inspired by an earlier collage, Sick Planets (2007-13) – also occupies the building’s glass façade during this New York art exhibition. 

‘One of the goals of this exhibition is to emphasise how Mutu translates themes and revisits ideas across media, and how this continues to be an important aspect of her practice,’ says curator Vivian Crockett, who worked with senior curator Margot Norton and curatorial assistant Ian Wallace on the show. ‘For example, we can see related concerns about mass consumerism and its uneven consequences in earlier collage-based works like This you call Civilization? (2008) appearing again in the video work, The End of carrying All (2015).’

She continues, ‘The title “Intertwined” also emphasises the interconnection between themes, strategies and materials throughout Mutu’s career. Because Mutu is an artist who has consistently expanded her practice and who is so prolific across media, we wanted to make the connection between the different aspects and so-called periods of her practice clear. The show places work from different moments in conversation together, as with Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors (2006) shown alongside her more recent Virus series (2017-2022).’

First known for her collage-based works from the late 1990s that explore the themes of camouflage and transformation, Mutu’s embrace of different visual mediums has seen her hybridised, fantastical forms drawn from folklore, myth and fable, take on a multilayered of their own. Steeped in socio-historical references, a by-product of her anthropological studies, and her own experiences of living and working between Nairobi and New York, Mutu’s practice has consistently challenged the ways that cultures and histories have been classified. 

‘Wangechi’s work has consistently emphasised how the legacies of colonialism, imperialism and their impacts on women manifest at various contemporary junctures. She has also consistently drawn parallels between historical traumas and the hyper-sexualisation of women more broadly – and often specifically Black women and women from the African continent – by highlighting the way media has normalised and desensitised us to both,’ Crockett says. ‘At the same time, in bringing to life otherworldly realities that disrupt and counteract historical and contemporary modes of oppression and exclusion, she presents us with a vision of a more equitable world and invites us to consider how we can make gradual but impactful moves in the present towards these goals.’

The most complete survey of Mutu’s work to date, ‘Intertwined’ is organised in a loose chronology, ‘to give visitors a general sense of shifts in Mutu’s practice. Each floor has its own distinct mood and emphasizes different aspects of her practice,’ explains Crockett. ‘The second floor highlights Mutu’s early work in mixed-media collage as they shift in scale and approach, including early commissions for NY- based institutions like the New Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem, alongside sculptures ranging from her Cooper Union period to more recent ones dating to 2022. The third-floor places greater emphasis on her interest in and use of natural materials, marked most prominently by her return to Nairobi in 2015 [and] the fourth-floor centres Mutu’s work in bronze, paired with her most recent large-scale collages.’

With her most significant and monumental undertakings, lesser-known projects, and early works that have rarely been seen, ‘Intertwined’ offers an unprecedented in-depth look at the progression of Mutu’s practice over the last 25 years. 

‘Intertwined’ by Wangechi Mutu, until 4 June 2023. newmuseum.org