I’m so very excited to introduce Wangechi Mutu for this weeks Monday Muse.
As a boudoir photographer that only focuses on creating art with women, I was immediately drawn to her sparkling, liquid, colorful, erotic, highly unique collages, drawings, sculptures and paintings of women.
I support black lives matter with all my heart.
I want to learn more, understand and listen more deeply to all the things important to this movement. I feel so blessed to be a part of this time in history when it feels closer to change that I’ve ever know it to be.
So naturally I’m going to spend some more time diving deeper into black woman in fine art. What an awesome assignment!
I’m so elated I found Mutu. She is so strong, passionate, sexy, and unique. I would love love love to photographer her, Mutu, are you out there? Come and shoot with me. What an honor that would be!
It’s a feeling, ART! Right?! And when it grabs you, you don’t immediately know why. Unless you are are truly an observer of your thought processes, the beauty and introspection might just pass you by.
When I look at her art, the first thing that grabs is the shapes and colors. I’m in a dream, heightened state, the truth is being shown through saddens, surprise, a little magic. I see our bodies of beautiful vessels of light, constantly moving, changing. What are we carrying, what is light, what is dark? It honestly feels like an aya trip.
I see her, mother, the divine feminine, Sophia God whatever you want to call it whispering to her in colors, faces, shapes.
She is clearly, authentically speaking through source and it’s absolutely breathtaking. I hope some day I get to meet her.
I’m crushing a little… What a gorgeous woman! Living her best life, so sexy!
From Artnet.com
“Wangechi Mutu is a contemporary Kenyan artist noted for her work conflating gender, race, art history, and personal identity. Creating complex collages, videos, sculptures, and performances, Mutu’s work features recurring mysterious leitmotifs such as masked women and snake-like tendrils.
Her pastiche-like practice combines a variety of source material and textures to explore consumerism and excess: for a 2005 work titled Cancer of the Uterus, Mutu employed a medical pathology diagram, facial features cut from a magazine, fur, and a heavy application of black glitter to create an eerily distorted face.
The almost science fiction-like nature of her imagery has placed her work within the realm of Afrofuturism, and her practice is often discussed as providing an alternate course of history for people of African descent.
Deeply concerned with Western commercialism, Mutu has explained that “a lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture.
Some of it’s insidious, some of it’s innocuous, some of it’s invisible.
It’s there.” Born on June 22, 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya, she received her BFA from Cooper Union in 1996, and subsequently her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2000.
Wangechi Mutu’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including a major retrospective that opened in the Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina in 2013, and traveled globally. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. “
Mutu is killin it!
