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Feminism, Fantasy, and the Future
John Haberin New York City
Wangechi Mutu
Wangechi Mutu has had a fantastic journey. It recalls a far more comforting Africa even in the midst of genocide, with herself at the center of her own private Eden, but with unmet needs and fantastic elements of its own. Egotism and fantasy make an appealing but disturbing recipe for feminism or for art.
So I wrote after her 2014 appearance at the Brooklyn Museum, but the journey has grown only more fantastic and more disturbing ever since. Mutu may seem to have it easy. Barely in her fifties, she has had two full-scale retrospectives. Born in Kenya, she came to New York to study art and remained, with a breakthrough among artists in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She became the very first to occupy the sculptural niches on the façade of the Met (the subject of a separate review). 
Now the New Museum gives her all three main exhibition floors plus its lobby gallery, video screens in the basement, and its rarely seen seventh-floor Sky Room, still another first.
Life, though, rarely runs in straight lines, and Mutu relishes the twists and turns. She has grown more confident, enough to turn increasingly from collage to video and monumental sculpture. She has sought her roots, but with westernized framed pictures as her family tree. Yo Mama could be a personal boast or a memorial, for her mother died in Africa's revenge killings. And then she returned to Nairobi in 2013, where a richer past and a troubled present took on new life, in baskets, blankets, and mud. My full review aims for something like order, turning first to past reports, as my latest upload.
At the New Museum, she may seem to have put her doubts behind her once and for all. She turns more and more to polished bronze with all its permanence and weight. Sleeping Serpent in black with a bulge at its center runs more than thirty feet, and it could well have swallowed you. A woman's limbs become tendrils, like the roots of an ancient coastal tree, entwining everything around them or to come. And then I found myself face to face with one of four bronzes from the Met. Could so arrogant a figure have been closer to human all along?
Her own private Eden
For such a vocal artist, Wangechi Mutu sure likes comfort and quiet. She wades with a white dress into blue waters, to the sounds of "Amazing Grace." She kneels in silence in the woods, with the icing on a cake all to herself. She constructs a forest of felt blankets, for protection as well as warmth. In a video commissioned for her opening at the Nasher Museum of Duke University, a subtitle spells it out: I needed to escape.
One might not know it, though, from her paintings and collage in Brooklyn. Mutu still hogs the spotlight, but prancing, in high heels or with her butt to the air. She plays the catwoman or a goat. Sometimes she comes in several versions within a single work, for this is one hyperactive woman and one hyperactive style. Flowers morph into clothing, writhing feet into hair, torn paper into leopard-skin tights, and machine parts into feet. Surely some of the acrylic stains on Mylar stand for blood—and some of the tendrils moving every which way for snakes.
Not that the videos and installation are as soothing as they sound. "Amazing Grace" is sung in an African language, with no grace to American ears, and the blue waters recall the ocean in which slave ships plied their trade. When Mutu digs into cake with long, sharp fingernails and then washes her hands, she could be pursuing pleasure, a dark ritual, a cleaning, or self-abnegation. The mottled gray blankets hold their own spurts of blood red, maybe or maybe not as flowers but definitely in lace lingerie, and one thick tree covering a fire exit has its bark and roots upside-down. She does find escape at last, but only after factories have filled the air with their pollution, before the smoke transforms into cumulus clouds in a sunnier sky. As she puts it with the title of one diptych, Your Story My Curse.
There is, of course, a precedent for an oversexed woman tempted by a commanding tree and a snake. This Eve seems quite proud of herself, and she does not need a man to share her temptations. One can always assume "the male gaze," especially in the Brooklyn Museum's Center for Feminist Art. Mutu, though, aspires to her own ecosystem—with woman, the museum explains, as "part human, animal, plant, and machine." Make that also part goddess, for she appropriates the kneeling black totem out of African art familiar from another black artist into high heels, Willie Cole. If the totem is traditionally male, all the better.
This woman is spoiling for a fight, in a museum for which community outreach has a way of meaning political correctness. As she puts it with another title, Yo Mama. She could be putting on a fashion show, down to the red lips, long eyelashes, and occasional shaved head and caked white skin. She could also be her own dark continent. Mutu may have left for New York at age twenty, but all but a case of sketches in Brooklyn dates from the last ten years—and most at the New Museum from the last five. When she calls a work People in Glass Towers Should Not Imagine Us, I thought back to September 11, and my heart lay with the imaginers.
I admired her among the women in "Born in Flames," at the Bronx Museum in 2021, but I still had my doubts. Art has had more than its share of primitivism, cartoon characters, escapism, and decorative overkill, and it deserves more than the tidy optimism of an exhibition titled "A Fantastic Journey." Mutu, though, like Toyin Ojih Odutola and David Alekhuogie, is fluid enough to move between feminism, racism, and private fantasies for a properly contemporary African art, like that of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré at MoMA. The Brooklyn Museum's curators, Trevor Schoonmaker with Saisha Grayson, give her not just a gallery but a site, and she runs with it. At her best, she keeps her sense of humor while putting herself on the line. As with Lily Wong, having one's own private Eden, even when felt lined, means risking one's own private fall.
Animalism and independence
Mutu risks political correctness at least as much, but often as not the risk pays off. As a truly hyphenated African-American, she touches all the right bases and pretensions. Yet her sophistication translates into a lingering encounter between African tradition and contemporary African art, personal history, and Modernism, much as for Hana Yilma Godine Bouabré. A woman is always at its center, possibly even her, although she has clipped pin-ups from porn magazines, and her mother's violent death looms over all. In the galleries in 2017, her alter ego curls up close to the floor, her human body ending in a fish or serpent's tail. She says that it belongs to a manatee, the marine mammal, but its slimness takes it closer to a range of associations with femininity and nature.
It alludes to a water woman from African folklore and to sirens from myths of both Africa and Europe. Her pointy breasts assert animalism and independence, while her smooth black surface calls up western sculpture, western images of women, and blackness. The slippery encounters extend to what she describes, the aquatic creature aside, as a "terrestrial cosmology." Women may appear directly, like one standing and leaning backward, surrounded or pierced by wood. There, too, Mutu evokes a woman as both temptress and vulnerable. Yet they also appear less directly, in forms as simple as spheres but modeled on viruses, and her mother was also a nurse.
Felt blankets allude to refugees, like unraveled threads for Lisa Alvarado, or to a woman as nurturer, although no longer bloodstained as in Brooklyn. They also rise into jagged pyramids, like ocean rocks where a siren might call sailors or refugees to their doom. The largest work may look at first like mud or bronze spheres, again from either continent, although of wood pulp. Larger spheres stand alone on pedestals, with more aggressive points on their surfaces. The ones on the floor cohere into a necklace, including a metal clip on the scale of coat hanger. Mutu turns her everyday possessions into myth, but she can still claim them as her own.
And that brings her to the New Museum, where pretty much all those works appear again, curated by Vivian Crockett and Margot Norton with Ian Wallace. Yet it does not just bring her up to date. Descending the stairs past Amazing Grace, I encountered the seated woman from the Met as an intimate acquaintance. Two figures in a canoe once stood outdoors in the light and landscape of Storm King Art Center, but now they must look to the lobby gallery for their very survival, with bronze casts after more relief blankets lining the walls. Another blanket covers a sole figure in the sunlit emptiness of the Sky Room, flat on her back. I tried to tell myself that this was a yoga exercise, as the title promises, and not a corpse.
Will relief ever come? In the show's title, celebration and despair are "Intertwined," much like those tendrils. Here Mutu's video of having cake and eating it, too, comes between the artist on her hands and knees, Cleaning Earth, and The End of Eating Everything. If anything, she has had to outgrow arrogance without losing her anger. A single floor brings her up to last five years, and the accusations ring out in her titles alone, like that reference to the Twin Towers. As another collage has it, You Tried So Hard to Make Us Away.
Earlier paint and collage also have firmer outlines, harsher colors, and flatter backgrounds, isolating the pin-up girls as they twist and turn. Now everything bursts freely into space, and the points of reference multiply before your eyes. A new work covers the lobby window, welcoming visitors with microorganisms that resolve into a woman's legs. Their paint splatters continue inside. Maybe she could always fall back on her sense of humor and sense of beauty to cope with anger, as with another title, The Gods Must Be Lazy. Video of what could be a mushroom cloud or a tornado witnesses a rising or setting sun.
Wangechi Mutu ran at The Brooklyn Museum through March 9, 2014, Barbara Gladstone through March 25, 2017, and the New Museum through June 4, 2023. A related report picks up Mutu at the Met.