With recent monumental commissions, the artists focus on the imagination’s role in accounting for the past.
Tag: Wangechi Mutu
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Mythological Moments from India’s First Biennale
KOCHI, India — I finally made the trip to Kerala, on India’s southern tip, not because tourism websites insist upon it as God’s own country, but because the first ever biennale hosted in India is taking place there at Kochi (or Cochin), a city that was once a thriving spice port. Bringing together an exciting range of artists from around the world in thirteen amazing venues, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has also boldly turned the searchlight on Indian contemporary art with a strong accent on the Keralam.