“… I always think that there’s something about trees that feels like they’re the original gallery space, the original place of worship and awe—where we brought our meager and modest human creations so that we could think about divine and unknowable things.”
- Wangechi Mutu in conversation with Trevor Schoonmaker, 2012
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-American artist who is based in both Nairobi and New York. Born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1972, Mutu works across a wide range of media including video, installation, collage, and sculpture. Her work is centered around hybrid and composite female figures that are part human, animal, plant, machine, monster, and land. She often talks about the importance of her roots in Kenya and how Kenyan history was not taught in Kenya while she was growing up. Instead, Kenyan children were taught British history, the colonizer’s history. In her work, Mutu investigates broad issues ranging from gender, race, colonialism, war, rituals, environmental transformation, displacement, hunger, consumption, and in particular, the exoticization of the black female body.
