With new sculptures melding tradition and futurism, WangechiMutu brings a changing of the guard to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Photograph by LaToya Ruby Frazier; Styled by Felicia Garcia-Rivera.
“I wanted to surprise myself,” Mutu says of this new chapter. “I wanted to get rid of some inherited or created baggage and leap to the next level.” This bicontinental life works remarkably well, she says, in part thanks to excellent wireless connectivity in Kenya, the result of decades of terrible, corrupt government phone service leading Kenyans, from tribesmen to grandmothers, to become early adopters of cell phones and text banking.
Her Kenyan workspace, currently a large converted garage with a tent for spray-painting and sculpting, is a place where Mutu can enjoy uninterrupted time to focus on her art, much of which is turning out to be monumental in scale and heavily influenced by the natural world. She is now seeing daily the animals and birds she’s long used as part of the mythological and metaphorical language of her portraits.
The caryatids are not the only Mutu figures stalking New York these days. A pair of her “Sentinels,” large sculptural figures born of this earthy, android-y mix, are currently winding up their sojourn in the Whitney Biennial, which runs through September 22. They’re imposingly grand mutant hybrids, with legs that might end in a hoof or a high-heeled shoe, and heads in a tree stump or a fringed adornment like a tribal crown.
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