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Authors: Sarah Thornton
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attentive crowd. And even though his face looks terrifically serious, his charismatic brush is keen to entertain. To my eyes, the portrait suggests the artist has magical powers.
* In the 1960s, an exploding cigar was considered a viable way to remove a Communist from office.
Wangechi Mutu
Me.I
2012
SCENE 9
Wangechi Mutu
I n Wangechi Mutu’s mother tongue, Kikuyu, there is no word for “artist.” The closest term is something like “magician” or “a person who uses objects and imbues them with meaning and power,” says the Kenyan-born artist. Mutu has synthetic blue and black braided hair extensions that are rolled into two buns on either side of her head, making her look like an African Princess Leia. The artist, who is almost forty, moved to America when she was twenty years old and has lived here ever since. She still speaks with a light British colonial lilt. Although the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, is a huge, cosmopolitan city—full of “talented folks” who aren’t just making “tourist paintings of giraffes,” as Mutu puts it—most artists with well-developed careers lead much of their lives outside Kenya. “A contemporary artist,” she explains, “is engaged with foreign culture.”
Mutu and I are in a brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. For some, Bed-Stuy is a black ghetto where white people rarely tread. For Mutu, it’s an immigrant neighborhood with a lot of cultural diversity, tension and energy. Unlike the hubs of the Brooklyn artist community (such as Williamsburg or Bushwick), Bed-Stuy appears impervious to young, single, white hipsters. However, the area is increasingly home to professional couples and artists do live nearby, mostly quietly with kids. Mutu makes a good living as she is representedby high-end dealers such as Barbara Gladstone in New York and Victoria Miro in London. Yet she enjoys the alternative pace here. “When you leave Manhattan,” she says, “things calm down and you can think.”
Mutu’s studio is on the parlor floor of her home. It has exposed red-brick walls, hardwood floors, and nineteenth-century moldings painted white. It is packed with well-organized clusters of magazine clippings, rolls of paper bundled in baskets, and stacks of colored duct tape. Mutu tells me that her assistants did a major cleanup yesterday in anticipation of my arrival, in part to prevent the environment from making me dizzy. In the center of the room is the artist’s “operating table,” where she pieces together her complex collages. An insomniac with a two-year-old daughter, Mutu relishes the comforts of home. “It isn’t the most studio-esque kind of space, but it has great light and it suits my weird habits,” she says. “I can walk in here at 4 A.M .” (The artist has another studio in an old navy yard where she makes larger-scale works, sculptures, videos, and installations. It has a concrete floor and a freight elevator and is anything but domestic.)
Three sizable works in progress adorn the walls here. They are all collages depicting fantastical women that look like crossbred aliens or futuristic witch doctors covered in body paint. “I am mostly, if not always, obsessed with images of women,” says Mutu. “As an African not living in my motherland, I’m also very sensitive to depictions of African people.” Two of the collages are in their early stages, and the artist refers to them affectionately as “infants.” One of these includes the silhouette of a naked female rock climber. “These strong women are in precarious positions, trying to get themselves up to a higher place,” she muses.
The third work, which is closer to completion, features a two-headed figure. The larger head looks out confidently at the viewer with one blue eye and one brown. A little man sits cross-legged under her perfect red lips and a snake coils like an elastic around her tree trunk of a ponytail. The other head could be a cyborg, with sparkly
* In the 1960s, an exploding cigar was considered a viable way to remove a Communist from office.
Wangechi Mutu
Me.I
2012
SCENE 9
Wangechi Mutu
I n Wangechi Mutu’s mother tongue, Kikuyu, there is no word for “artist.” The closest term is something like “magician” or “a person who uses objects and imbues them with meaning and power,” says the Kenyan-born artist. Mutu has synthetic blue and black braided hair extensions that are rolled into two buns on either side of her head, making her look like an African Princess Leia. The artist, who is almost forty, moved to America when she was twenty years old and has lived here ever since. She still speaks with a light British colonial lilt. Although the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, is a huge, cosmopolitan city—full of “talented folks” who aren’t just making “tourist paintings of giraffes,” as Mutu puts it—most artists with well-developed careers lead much of their lives outside Kenya. “A contemporary artist,” she explains, “is engaged with foreign culture.”
Mutu and I are in a brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. For some, Bed-Stuy is a black ghetto where white people rarely tread. For Mutu, it’s an immigrant neighborhood with a lot of cultural diversity, tension and energy. Unlike the hubs of the Brooklyn artist community (such as Williamsburg or Bushwick), Bed-Stuy appears impervious to young, single, white hipsters. However, the area is increasingly home to professional couples and artists do live nearby, mostly quietly with kids. Mutu makes a good living as she is representedby high-end dealers such as Barbara Gladstone in New York and Victoria Miro in London. Yet she enjoys the alternative pace here. “When you leave Manhattan,” she says, “things calm down and you can think.”
Mutu’s studio is on the parlor floor of her home. It has exposed red-brick walls, hardwood floors, and nineteenth-century moldings painted white. It is packed with well-organized clusters of magazine clippings, rolls of paper bundled in baskets, and stacks of colored duct tape. Mutu tells me that her assistants did a major cleanup yesterday in anticipation of my arrival, in part to prevent the environment from making me dizzy. In the center of the room is the artist’s “operating table,” where she pieces together her complex collages. An insomniac with a two-year-old daughter, Mutu relishes the comforts of home. “It isn’t the most studio-esque kind of space, but it has great light and it suits my weird habits,” she says. “I can walk in here at 4 A.M .” (The artist has another studio in an old navy yard where she makes larger-scale works, sculptures, videos, and installations. It has a concrete floor and a freight elevator and is anything but domestic.)
Three sizable works in progress adorn the walls here. They are all collages depicting fantastical women that look like crossbred aliens or futuristic witch doctors covered in body paint. “I am mostly, if not always, obsessed with images of women,” says Mutu. “As an African not living in my motherland, I’m also very sensitive to depictions of African people.” Two of the collages are in their early stages, and the artist refers to them affectionately as “infants.” One of these includes the silhouette of a naked female rock climber. “These strong women are in precarious positions, trying to get themselves up to a higher place,” she muses.
The third work, which is closer to completion, features a two-headed figure. The larger head looks out confidently at the viewer with one blue eye and one brown. A little man sits cross-legged under her perfect red lips and a snake coils like an elastic around her tree trunk of a ponytail. The other head could be a cyborg, with sparkly
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