Shantay Robinson
She was born of the sea. A Drexciyan mythology turned corporeal embodiment, Water Woman (2017) is Wangechi Mutu’s opus to the captured African would-be mothers who were thrown off slave ships due to illness or inability to make the trip across the Atlantic Ocean. Fashioned in a deep black bronze, Water Woman sits poised with the African features of her motherland. A cross between human and aquatic likenesses, she doesn’t belong to any one species. Mutu rejects the ownership that Black women’s bodies are subjected to in their experiences as Black and women.
Water Women (2017)
Wangechi Mutu’s art exists in the Afrofuturistic canon of art. Afrofuturism is a concept where artists and other intellectuals, such as authors and scholars, look to the past to reimgine Black trauma and imagine futuristic utopian worlds. Water Woman embodies this concept, as it depicts the horrors that captured African women faced, but this artwork depicts the outcome of that horror and creates beauty from it. Mutu navigates this delicate line with finesse. Her figure is extraordinarily elusive, as she depicts the attitude of Black women while foregrounding enslavement and misogyny’s resultant terror on the Black woman’s body.
Yo Mama (2003)
Her work offers an alternative among the conventional representations of Black women, which often solely offer their bodies up for objectification. While Mutu often uses Black female bodies in her work, she depicts the grotesqueness of the Black women’s stories not often told. She tells the story of resilience and beauty Black women exude despite traversing hideous historical narratives. Black women’s bodies have been hypervisible through the forceful nature in which they were made to produce a workforce and through sexually wanton depictions historically.
Riding Death in My Sleep (2002)
In her monograph she tells art historian Courtney J. Martin, “I am very much a believer that the limitations that we've placed upon what art represents – like, ‘Art is a painting’ or ‘Art belongs in a museum’ – have a lot to do with colonization and the attempt to own things that are sacred and un-ownable.” Mutu’s art depicts the un-ownable. Black women have made evident that despite ownership as enslaved people and despite the degradation of widely held stereotypical beliefs, they are the owners of their bodies and have options for representation.
Mutu is Kenyan born, but practices in New York City. She attended The New School for Social Research and Parsons School of Art and Design for fine art and anthropology. But she eventually received a Bachelor of Fine Art from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Arts and Science. Then she went on to Yale School of Art to receive a masters degree in sculpture. Her work has been collected by prestigious arts institutions, including Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and others.
Wangechi Mutu by Phaidon Books was published this year. And a retrospective of more than 100 of her works are on view in an exhibition titled, Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined at the New Museum until June 4.