The Collection

Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan American artist working across collage, painting, sculpture, film, and performance. Born in Nairobi, she studied at Cooper Union (BFA, 1996) and earned an MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2000. She works between Brooklyn, New York, and Nairobi.

Mutu first gained recognition for paintings and collages addressing the violence and misrepresentation visited on women, especially Black women, in the contemporary world. Her practice has since grown into worlds populated by powerful, hybridized female figures, drawing on sexuality, femininity, ecology, and politics. It has been described as a form of myth-making, offering symbolic female characters distinct from those in classical history or popular culture.

In 2019, she received the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s inaugural Facade Commission, and her bronze sculptures The NewOnes, will free Us occupied the museum’s Fifth Avenue niches. Her solo exhibitions include Intertwined at the New Museum, New York (2023), which traveled to the New Orleans Museum of Art (2024); Storm King Art Center (2022); I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco (2021); and Black Soil Poems at the Galleria Borghese, Rome (2025), where she became the first living woman artist to hold a solo exhibition. In 2026, she was invited to the 61st Venice Biennale and received the National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship with Art Fund. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Tate, among others.