“Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” fills the New Museum with a career's worth of work

by Meryl Phair

 One gallery floor of the New Museum is hardly enough to contain the over one hundred works in the solo exhibition “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined.” The artist’s twenty-five-year career spills out from the museum's second, third, and fourth floors into the lobby gallery. The curation brings together a constellation of paintings, collages, drawings, sculptures, and films that display Mutu’s experimental artistic vision.

 Born in Kenya in 1972, Mutu came to New York in the early 1990s but has since spent most of her life in Nairobi. Working across various media, Mutu crafts a distinctive hybrid approach to exploring complex legacies of colonialism, globalization, and African cultural traditions. Her work pays particular attention to the spiritual, molding folkloric narratives into solid form through paper pulp, wood glue, soil, and shells. 

Through the hybridity of her work, Mutu plays with boundaries. Texture, color, and images permeate her pieces in unexpected ways. In combination with the interplay of the human body and the rhizomatic interconnectivity of the natural world, the collection feels alive and breathing. 

Mutu brings an expansive imagination to engage with critical questions pulsing through our world today. “Her work grapples with contemporary realities and proffers new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis,” states an introductory plaque on the exhibit wall. “Mutu’s work presciently addresses some of today’s most vital questions concerning historical violence and its impact on women and our inextricable ties to one another, our ecosystems, and all life forms with which we share our planet.”

Over half of the pieces in the exhibit have never been on view in New York City and will be on display through June 4, 2023. For more information, look online at  “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined.”