Art, Design & Fashion
Landmark
Wangechi Mutu
born 1972
The first artist in 117 years to fill the Metropolitan Museum's facade niches
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Kenya Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
In 2019 she put four seated Black women in the empty niches on the front of the Met — the first sculptures to stand there in a hundred and seventeen years.
Wangechi Mutu was born in Nairobi on 22 June 1972 and works in collage, sculpture, film and performance, on gender, race, colonialism and environmental destruction, and above all on how Black women are looked at.
In 2019 she made The NewOnes, will free Us — four bronze figures for the exterior niches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the first work installed there in a hundred and seventeen years, drawing on the caryatid to put women of colour on the pedestals instead. Her retrospective Intertwined opened at the New Museum in 2023 with a hundred and fifteen works. She was Deutsche Bank's Artist of the Year in 2010 and took a United States Artists grant in 2014.
In 2019 she made The NewOnes, will free Us — four bronze figures for the exterior niches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the first work installed there in a hundred and seventeen years, drawing on the caryatid to put women of colour on the pedestals instead. Her retrospective Intertwined opened at the New Museum in 2023 with a hundred and fifteen works. She was Deutsche Bank's Artist of the Year in 2010 and took a United States Artists grant in 2014.
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