Unlike Mutu’s Met commission, at the Legion of Honor, Mutu continues the reclamation processes into and throughout the museum.
Wangechi Mutu
Posted inOpinion
Kehinde Wiley, Wangechi Mutu, and Kara Walker Upstage the Monuments Debate
With recent monumental commissions, the artists focus on the imagination’s role in accounting for the past.
Posted inArt
The Many Afterlives and Expressions of the African Diaspora
To commemorate the 400-year anniversary of the arrival of the first slave ships in the United States, a recent exhibition at the Allen Memorial Art Museum explores Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic.”
Posted inArt
The Defiant Spirit of Wangechi Mutu’s Caryatids at the Metropolitan Museum
In reflecting on Mutu’s recent commission for the Met’s façade one morning, I realized that her sculptures make space for excellences and joys that dominant Eurocentric histories have ignored and excluded.
Posted inNews
Simone Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, Kehinde Wiley, and Vinnie Bagwell In the Running for New Central Park Memorial
The artists were selected as finalists to replace a statue of J. Marion Sims, a 19th-century doctor who conducted violent surgeries on enslaved Black women.
Posted inArt
Wangechi Mutu Adorns the Met Museum’s Façade With Images of African Queendom
For the first time in 117 years, the empty niches on the museum’s exterior are occupied. Mutu’s four bronze sculpture express resilience and wisdom.
Posted inArt
Black Identity Seen Through the Lens of Pulp Stories
In Black Pulp! at the International Print Center New York, artists and co-curators William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson connect the literary genre of pulp with one of its most powerful vehicles: the story of blackness in the United States.
Posted inArt
Building a Black Identity That’s Both Ancient and Contemporary
The first time I saw Stan Squirewell’s work was around two or three years ago.
Posted inArt
Grace Jones’s Indelible Influence on Contemporary Art
SAN FRANCISCO — The Jamaican-born supermodel, actress, singer, songwriter, and record producer Grace Jones has been a unique force in many worlds, which has led her to be both a subject and inspiration for much contemporary art.
Posted inArt
Two Chelsea Galleries Go Wall Out for Summer
‘Tis the season of reduced hours and low-stakes group shows at most Manhattan galleries, but two spaces in Chelsea are bucking the trend with summer exhibitions of large-scale murals.
Posted inArt
Personal but Highly Political Highlights from the 2015 Venice Biennale
VENICE — As I feel my way through a curtain and into a pitch-black, cavernous space, a white square shimmers in the distance.
Posted inBooks
The Grotesque Beauty of Wangechi Mutu
Culled from old medical illustrations and National Geographic, pornographic, motorcycle, and fashion magazine clippings, Wangechi Mutu’s writhing female figures have a dangerous beauty to them, one that’s grotesque and alluring all at once. A traveling exhibition — recently closed at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art and opening in October at the Brooklyn Museum — surveys her experimentation with history, gender, and race since the mid-1990s.