Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu was born in 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya. In 1990, the artist moved from her hometown to New York, where she still lives and works today. Her early artistic output was characterized by simple black-and-white sketches, which later shifted to painting, and then evolved into increasingly elaborate collages, thanks to her use of various materials. Eventually, she turned to installations. All of Mutu’s works revolve around the female body— inverted, expanded, mystified, amputated, or reconfigured—blending diverse ethnic and identity-related elements. The female body represents a natural starting point for Mutu, as she considers it the “privileged site” of political and cultural conflict. As she asserts: “The female body bears the marks of its own culture more than the male body (…) the ravaged female body is exposed to a relentless social vulnerability.”

In Greek, the word “trauma” literally means “wound,” and while it refers to the body, it also serves as a metaphor for psychological suffering. The wound that opens a fissure in the skin symbolically represents trauma. Collage is the technique Wangechi Mutu uses to subvert imagery, evoking concepts of fragmentation and layering. Her early works were created using clippings from contemporary magazines that the artist considers emblematic of the society that produced them. Mutu sets no boundaries for her assemblages: she combines traditional images with pages cut from fashion magazines like Vogue, National Geographic, and others, as well as African postcards and clippings from pornographic magazines, all paired with glitter, beads, and sequins that lend a visually precious quality to the composition. They represent what that community has consumed, digested, and finally expelled in terms of social and political culture, as seen in the works within the Iannaccone Collection.

Untitled (2004) in particular depicts a Black woman sitting cross-legged on a mass of light, grass, and butterflies. From her head, crowned by an archaic African sculpture, sprout spider legs. In one hand, she holds a snake with a severed head, from which a stream of blood flows. “Since I am Black, many assume that I speak only about Black women. (…) For some mysterious reason, which would be interesting to investigate, the tendency to conflate the artist with their work becomes more pronounced when the artist is Black. (…) But, quite frankly, I don’t think it makes sense to keep insisting on these oppositions in the present day.”