Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey

“If you want to know what an animal’s system is about,” Mutu has said in an interview, “you look at its shit. . . . You sift through its stool.” With the same scatological process, Mutu sifts through the shit of the newsstand—ethnographic magazines, muscle car rags, fashion, and porn—to diagnose a global diet of excess, violence, and the battlefield of women’s bodies. more

Cinqué Hicks reviews Wangechi Mutu's exhibition at Duke University 500 Mile Radius  

Wangechi Mutu, Suspended Play Time, 2008/2013, twine, garbage bags, and gold string, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. © Wangechi Mutu. Image courtesy of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. Photo by Peter Paul Geoffrion. In background, People in Glass Towers Should Not Imagine Us, 2003, mixed-media collage on paper, overall: 70 x 102 inches, Collection of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicolas Rohatyn, New York. Image courtesy of Salon 94, New York. © Wangechi Mutu.

Wangechi Mutu, One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack,2004, cut-and-pasted printed paper with watercolor, synthetic polymer paint, and pressure-sensitive stickers on transparentized paper, irreg. 68 1/2 x 42 inches, Fund for the Twenty-First Century.

Wangechi Mutu, A Shady Promise, 2006, mixed-media collage on mylar, overall: 87.5 x 108.75 inches, the Speyer Family Collection, New York. © Wangechi Mutu.