Wangechi Mutu was born in 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya, she works in New York and Nairobi.
In her diverse practice, Wangechi Mutu reflects on sexuality, femininity, ecology, politics, the rhythms and chaos of the world and our often damaging or futile efforts to control it. At its core, her work emphasises the powerful and inescapable symbiotic connections that determine our common fate.
The artist was first recognised for paintings and collages concerned with the myriad forms of violence and misrepresentation visited upon women, especially Black women, in the contemporary world. More recently, exploring and subverting cultural preconceptions of the female body and the feminine, Mutu proposes worlds within worlds, populated by powerful hybridised female figures. Her practice has been described as engaging in her own unique form of myth-making, one in which the interweaving of fact with fiction opens up possibilities for another group of symbolic female characterisations, markedly different from those that appear in either classical history or popular culture.
Over the past two decades, Mutu has exhibited extensively in international forums. Recent selected solo exhibitions include In Minor Keys, 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2026); Black Soil Poems, Galleria Borghese, Rome; and 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).
Recent group exhibitions include Iter Subterraneum, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen; Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, MACBA, Barcelona, Spain; New Humans: Memories of the Future, New Museum, New York (2026); Victoria Miro: 40 Years, Victoria Miro London (2025); Spirit in the Land, The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville (2024); Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2024); Blaque Orbit, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2024); Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, First Museum of Art, Nashville (2023); A Gateway to Possible Worlds: Art & Science-fiction at Centre Pompidou-Metz, Paris (2023); Feminine power: the divine to the demonic, The British Museum, London (2022–23); In the Black Fantastic, Hayward Gallery, London (2022); What Is Left Unspoken, Love, at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2022) and Prospect.5: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow, New Orleans (2021–22).
Mutu’s work is in the collections of museums including Brooklyn Art Museum, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; Pérez Art Museum Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Tate, London.
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). In 2025, she became the first living female artist to exhibit at Rome’s Galleria Borghese with Black Soil Poems.
Source: Victoria Miro Gallery
