Although I did not know it at the time, Wangechi Mutu’s “Intertwined,” a survey spanning nearly thirty years, began with my encountering her outdoor installation In Two Canoe, 2022, last year on the grounds of Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York. The bronze vessel—containing a pair of creatures with elegantly elongated cocoon-shaped heads, wearing either leaf-embossed helmets or a cornrow-patterned camouflage mimicking plant ribs—also made its appearance on the first floor of the New Museum. The work introduces us to the twinning visual and metaphorical grammar utilized by the Kenyan artist in this massive presentation that featured more than two hundred works spanning painting, drawing, collage (or a combination thereof), animation, sculpture, and installation. In Two Canoe immediately invited us to enter Mutu’s rich universe, where we encounter a host of binding pairs that structured the show: inside(r)/outside(r), human/animal, heads/tails, Kikuyu/English.
Bronze embodies the literal and symbolic weight of building new modes of transport to enable us to carry on with the work of liberation. It is heavy, but we are also moving between ports, these seeming like so many membranes through which diasporic energy infuses the transfer amid wounds and world-building. For example, by fastening together experiential perspectives on Pan-Africanist unity and diasporic womanist resistance to devastation, Mutu plaits together and relinquishes the plot of all male-dominated patriarchal tribalism—including the cult of Catholicism, anti-holistic “Western” medicine, AI-powered neoliberal extractive economies, and ongoing regimes of institutional discipline.
In the title work Intertwined, 2003, a watercolor collage on paper, we made eye contact with a pair of fashionable upright dogs—a cancan team sashaying through connotations of the word bitch and cheekily embracing all it implies. I was compelled by this piece because it appears representative of a team that is perhaps on the way to being part of a pack. The work also nullifies the more pejorative aspects surrounding the term “dog”—how could comparing a human being to such a gorgeous and noble creature be seen as adverse or antagonistic?
Whether tired bodies or tender beasts, the masses of people on this earth are taken over by the absurdity of increasing corporatized labor—agricultural, industrial, managerial—that is killing us. The End of Carrying All, 2015, a digital animation, shows the whole of human history through a folk tale–style narrative featuring a woman walking with a bundle atop her head. However, as she travels, her load begins to grow larger and larger as it collects skyscrapers, satellite dishes, cell towers, and all the garbage of mass consumption. Finally the mass is transformed into a bioluminescent glob that slides off a cliff and into the sea, only to be burped up again as primordial ooze.
The sculptures of the titular insects that make up the installation Moth Collection, 2010—crafted from porcelain, chalk, leather, feathers, acrylic, duct tape, newsprint, and paper—conjure a physio-temporal shift in the exhibition. Are we, too, drawn to drawing the blood of others in a stupor akin to the dream haze that watching a moth dance to a flame invokes? The pain and pleasure are delightful, invigorating even, but also deadly. And yet, throughout this retrospective, there was also a sense of being brought to an awareness of the beginning of time, of encountering a glimpse of our total annihilation while tethered to everything else that gives life, tight as matted palm leaves. This awareness allows us to hold onto the possibility that we may, despite every dire thing, begin again.
Mutu has embraced the spiritual necessity of splitting her studio practice, like a serpent’s tongue, between New York and Nairobi, Kenya, learning from nature, myriad cultures, and her Pan-Africanist roots. The artist, who also studied anthropology, recognizes and claims the similarities happening between various folk-tale traditions—from Kikuyu lore to the Brothers Grimm and the stories of Br’er Rabbit that move between African-descended peoples of the Caribbean and the American South—and is deeply sensitive to the ways that beliefs about ourselves, our neighbors, and our species underlie all the actions that go into the creation of our world.
