Ndoro Na Miti
January 27 — March 25, 2017
New York: 21st Street
Gladstone is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Wangechi Mutu. The title for this exhibition comes from the Gikuyu words for mud and trees, the prima materia for this body of work. Expanding her sculptural practice, this installation proposes an alternative to the systemic modes of representation in both Western and Eastern traditions by reimagining and recontextualizing the relations between the body, the natural world, and social forces. Well known for collages of hybrid forms drawn from folklore, popular culture, and art history, this new work marks an evolution in Mutu’s critique of the construction of self-image. The complex texture and form that these figures offer prompt inquiry into the relationship between human existence and environment, producing interactions both intimate and challenging.
Installation
Work
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.
