Wangechi Mutu is a contemporary Kenyan artist renowned for her multidisciplinary work that weaves together themes of gender, race, colonial legacies, personal identity, and art history. Working across collage, sculpture, video, and performance, Mutu creates visually arresting and symbolically rich compositions. Her recurring motifs—masked female figures, serpentine forms, and otherworldly hybrids—evoke a dreamlike, often unsettling atmosphere that challenges conventional narratives of beauty, power, and representation.Mutu's practice is characterized by a pastiche aesthetic, layering diverse materials and references to comment on consumerism and cultural excess. In her 2005 piece Cancer of the Uterus, she merged anatomical diagrams, magazine clippings, fur, and thick black glitter to produce a grotesque and mesmerizing visage, blurring the line between body and myth. Her futuristic and speculative imagery has aligned her work with Afrofuturism, offering reimagined histories and futures for people of African descent.Deeply critical of Western consumer culture and its imprint on African societies, Mutu has remarked, “A lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there.”Born on June 22, 1972, in Nairobi, Kenya, Mutu earned her BFA from Cooper Union in 1996 and her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2000. Her work has been exhibited globally, including a landmark retrospective at the Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina in 2013. In 2019, she made history with The NewOnes, will free Us, the first-ever Facade Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The installation featured four monumental bronze sculptures—The Seated I, II, III, and IV—placed in niches that had remained empty since the museum's founding 117 years earlier.Wangechi Mutu currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.