About
In her diverse practice, Wangechi Mutu (b.1972, Nairobi, Kenya) reflects on sexuality, femininity, ecology, politics, the rhythms and chaos of the world and our often damaging or futile efforts to control it. Exploring and subverting cultural preconceptions of the female body and the feminine, Mutu proposes worlds within worlds, populated by powerful hybridized female figures.
Wangechi Mutu lives and works between Brooklyn and Nairobi. Mutu received her MFA from Yale University (2000) and BFA from Cooper Union (1996). Her work has been the subject of numerous solo shows, including Black Soil Poems, Galleria Borghese, Rome; Cleaning EARTH, Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome (2025); Wangechi Mutu:Intertwined, New Museum, New York (2023), travelling to New Orleans Museum of Art (2024); Wangechi Mutu, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor (2022), Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?, Legion of Honor, San Francisco (2021); A Promise to Communicate, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018); and Wangechi Mutu: The End of eating Everything, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX (2018). In 2019, she inaugurated The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Facade Commission, with an exhibition entitled The NewOnes, will free Us.
Wangechi Mutu's work has been included in the 56th (2015) and 61st (2026) International Art Exhibitions of La Biennale di Venezia, as well as the 2019 Whitney Biennial, New York.
Mutu was the Artist Honoree at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2025); Storm King Art Center (2024); Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art (2024); Nasher Museum of Art (2023); the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (2018); and the Hirshhorn Museum (2017).
Mutu's work is held in international institutional collections, including Brooklyn Art Museum, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Art (MFA), Houston; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Exhibitions
Select Press
‘In Minor Keys’: discover the themes that define the 61st Venice Biennale exhibition
Wallpaper* ↗Amah-Rose Abrams
May 7, 2026
Wangechi Mutu Awarded National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship in Landmark UK Collaboration
Art Plugged ↗April 22, 2026
Download PDF ↓111 Artists Announced for the Venice Biennale
artnet News ↗Jo Lawson-Tancred
February 25, 2026
Download PDF ↓The 100 Best Artworks of the 21st Century: Wangechi Mutu, “Yo Mama,” 2003
ARTnews ↗Alex Greenberger
March 5, 2025
Download PDF ↓Afrofuturism: Reimagining the Past and Telling a Black Fantastic Future
ARTnews ↗Shantay Robinson
February 18, 2025
Download PDF ↓Video























