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she doesn’t always have an end goal in mind when she’s sketching. “I draw every-
thing,” she says. “Sometimes it’s stream of consciousness that I do as I proceed with
other projects, or if I’m stuck.” Like many artists, Mutu has managed to maintain
a sense of play in her work. “There’s no pressure on the thoughts to be completed,”
she says.
In 2019, the Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art included
three of her sculptures, and across town the Metropolitan Museum of Art promi-
nently inserted her caryatid sculptures into the niches on the exterior of its building.
The show at the Legion of Honor, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,
will be among her most significant exhibitions to date, and Mutu and the curators
have taken an unusual approach. Instead of dedicating a few spaces to the artist,
they will strategically place the 18 works in the museum’s courtyard and throughout
its first-floor galleries. The arrangement—meant to offer a critique of colonialism,
with African culture asserting itself in multiple Eurocentric spaces—makes it as
much an intervention as an exhibition.
“It triggers contemplation about the cost of history,” says Claudia Schmuckli, the
curator in charge of contemporary art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
and the organizer of the show. “The achievements of the West come at a price.”
The courtyard, ringed by majestic Ionic columns and centered on Rodin’s The
Thinker, will be joined by four of Mutu’s bronzes: MamaRay and Crocodylus, both
part-human and part-animal, as well as two of Mutu’s Shavasana sculptures, which
depict lifeless female figures lying on their backs under palm-frond mats, with color-
ful stiletto heels sticking out.
Mutu understands that the placement of the pieces is nearly as important as the
figures themselves. “I really wanted those works to be next to the Rodin because of
the contradiction,” Mutu says, referring to her horizontal Shavasana works, a coun-
terpoint to the traditional verticality of the Rodin. “The pieces on the ground are
essentially like dead bodies. So they’re the opposite of the stature and authority.”
She calls the figures a way to express “my complete horror in how the bodies of Black
women are consistently showing up in violent situations.”
Trevor Schoonmaker, the director of Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art
in Durham, North Carolina, notes that “the central element in Wangechi’s work
is Black femininity. The protagonist is always going to be a Black female figure.”
Schoonmaker has known Mutu for more than 20 years, and he commissioned
MamaRay for the Nasher, where it will eventually live after its San Francisco debut.
From the moment he first saw Mutu’s work, Schoonmaker was struck by “the
innovation of her ideas and her articulation of form,” he says. “Her knowledge of the
symbolic use of materials was really striking.” This is true regardless of medium: The
San Francisco show includes a film, My Cave Call, with another mythical creature.
Sculpture is just one of what Mutu refers to with a laugh as her many personalities.
Mutu’s higher education began with courses in anthropology at the New School,
which she studied along with art at the affiliated Parsons School of Design, after
moving to New York in 1992. “I couldn’t afford it, so I
moved to Cooper Union,” she says of the school where
she finished her bachelor’s degree. “Thank goodness
I got in.” In 2000 she received a master’s in fine arts
from Yale, with a concentration in sculpture. “I was
making films, I was doing collages, I was drawing,”
she recalls. “My critiques were so schizophrenic.”
Collage was the medium that first got Mutu
noticed, once she moved back to New York after Yale.
Her cramped Brooklyn quarters weren’t practical for
making sculpture. She says that the collages came
out of a sense that, artistically, forward motion was
required: “I just have to keep swimming; if I stop, I’m
going to drown.” The works were fantastical, surreal
and at times grotesque riffs on female portraiture,
with human, plant and animal parts rearranged and
grafted together.
“I used to go to the Strand and pick up books on
sale, and I’d have all this material immediately that I
could just go home and cut up,” Mutu says, acknowl-
edging that the works may have been influenced
by a graphic design gig in Kenya during a gap year.
She often embellished the images with watercolor,
a medium she came to love. “You often ruin it when
you go back and start reworking—you can’t fix water-
colors,” she says. “You have to be at peace with what
you’ve done.” She has much less interest in oil paint-
ing, with its endless possibility of repainting and
second-guessing.
“I admired how Wangechi was pulling from dif-
ferent sources, references, imagery and materials
to create a complex visual language uniquely her
own,” the Nigerian-born, Los Angeles–based artist
Njideka Akunyili Crosby says in an email about those
early works. “I felt an immediate resonance with her
work. Even though
we are from differ-
ent African countries,
there is overlap in our
experiences.”
Akunyili Crosby,
known for her richly
layered and patternedOPEN PLAN
From top: Mutu keeps
many watercolor options
at hand; the roof’s saw-
tooth design houses a
series of skylights that
bathe the studio workspace
in natural light.137canvases, says her overall aesthetic was influenced
by what she calls Mutu’s “work in media that defies
categorization and creates elaborate hybrid forms—
which echo the hybridity of postcolonial and
immigrant experiences.”
Akunyili Crosby, who is about a decade younger,
recalls being starstruck upon seeing Mutu on the street
in New York one day and meeting her; sometime later,
she invited Mutu for a studio visit. Akunyili Crosby
got vital feedback, and the two became friends. “We even ended up trading works,”
Akunyili Crosby adds. “I have my Wangechi in our living room, and it brings joy to
my life every time I enter our house or walk into the room.”MUTU’S AESTHETIC JOURNEY began with drawing. “I remember drawing at the age
of 3,” she says of her Nairobi upbringing. Her father, a teacher, made his own pictures
to encourage her. “Things that you don’t think can be captured, he would capture it,”
says Mutu. “It was impressive for me to see that. It was a lightbulb going off.”
Mutu, whose mother was a nurse and a midwife and owned a pharmacy (both
her parents are now retired), attended Catholic school as a young girl, where she
received no artistic encouragement. “No one said, ‘This is definitely your thing. You
should go for it and focus and work harder,’” she says. By high school, there was
at least one helpful teacher, though the overall message was that an artistic career
was not a real possibility. Mutu, however, was set in her mind: “Nope, this is it,” she
recalls thinking.
Looking back on her childhood, she also recalls that it was “built upon these
echoes of an unspoken trauma,” the period of colonial British rule in Kenya, from
1920 to 1963. Violence and authority, and how those forces can be hidden or trans-
formed, are recurrent themes in her work. “For me, any kind of alteration and
augmentation of one’s body is done for the singular purpose of survival,” Mutu says,
adding that the female mutations she depicts are “some part disguise, some part
camouflage, some part battle gear.”
Mutu draws inspiration from her surroundings, and working from her studio in
Africa has changed her art and helped her get back to sculpture in earnest. “The plant
and animal world does actually impact me in a really powerful way because it has its
own power base, its own life,” Mutu says, noting that her time there is “completely
connected to my use of clay and the muds and all of these really tactile materials.”Several works in I Am Speaking incorporate Kenya’s
red volcanic soil, including the three abstracted fig-
ures in Mirror Faced (I,II,III) (2020).
Giving shape to a major piece like MamaRay
requires much planning and much hands-on work.
“We see her hand in everything,” says Schoonmaker.
“That’s why they’re so effective.”
The process varies for her bronzes, but after the
initial drawing stage, Mutu usually makes two sizes
of maquette. Once it’s at the scale of the final piece,
she adds detail to the putty-like modeling material.
“That’s when I do have someone help me with all the
sculpting,” says Mutu, who has an assistant mirror
her motions. At the foundry, she makes the last ver-sion in red wax, which is turned into a mold.
It becomes a bronze in the traditional “lost wax”
process—similar to the way Rodin made his bronzes,
with molten metal replacing the melted-away wax.
“Bronze has permanence,” Mutu says. “It is defi-
nitely a here-to-stay material.”
She reserved some of the most lavish attention
for the elaborately grooved and studded surface of
MamaRay. “The front part of the ray is an obsession
of mine,” says Mutu, particularly the idea of “scarifi-
cation, and how Black skin tends to heal. The wound
is always that much more visible because of the lay-
ers of scar tissue.”
The point of the piece, Mutu says, is to create “an
alternate iconography, an alternate type of heroic
image of the goddess female.” (She says that the
image of the Virgin Mary, prominent in her Catholic
school education, probably informs the work as
well.) Without a doubt, the image of this rising fig-
ure is daunting in its power, but Mutu also sees
something “beckoning” in the way she seems to be
“capturing all of us with these big wings.”
Mutu is curious about how viewers will see the
piece. “There’s also a softness in her gaze, believe it
or not,” she says, adding that her own perception of
the work has changed over time. “I’ve been hanging
out with a lion in the lair,” she says, “and I don’t know
that it’s scary anymore.” •FOUND POETRY
Below right: A sculpture
of branches, paper and
pulp, with a tree-trunk
head, left outside to dry.
Bottom: Mutu with
one of her three dogs and
a prayer-bead sculpture
placed on a female figure.