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Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey

Wangechi Mutu’s Family Tree

Publication ,  Chapter
Stiles, K
2013

Listen to Binyavanga Wainaina, Kenyan author and winner of the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing, commenting after an encounter with Wangechi Mutu’s art. “Your power to rearrange what has been presented to control you is your powerful weapon,” he explains, “for you can make what you want with your world.” While Wainaina implicitly nods to a plural “you,” believing “us” able to transform the world, he refers directly to Mutu’s resourceful invention of composite portraits of the metaphorical “we” that she continually reforms in images, objects, and actions. Mutu works in every medium to invent this hybrid, from drawing, painting, and collage to sculpture, installation, performance, and film. She cuts into what separates us with the precision of a surgeon before suturing our reconstruction from fragile visual slivers of the wounded family of humankind, already fragmented, deformed, and traumatized. This essay is about Mutu’s two-decades-long visual analysis of world culture and its planetary rootedness in racial, sexual, economic, and national divides, war, and the violence of privilege; it is about Mutu’s refusal to accept as invincible the conventions of otherness culturally naturalized to isolate and conquer; it is about her exacting reconstruction of shared states of collective subjectivity and cultural agency; and it is about her effort to “reclaim,” in her words, “an imagined future.”

Duke Scholars

ISBN

978-0938989363

Publication Date

2013

Publisher

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
 

Citation

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Stiles, K. (2013). Wangechi Mutu’s Family Tree. In T. Schoonmaker (Ed.), Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey. Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.
Stiles, K. “Wangechi Mutu’s Family Tree.” In Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, edited by Trevor Schoonmaker. Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2013.
Stiles K. Wangechi Mutu’s Family Tree. In: Schoonmaker T, editor. Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey. Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; 2013.
Stiles, K. “Wangechi Mutu’s Family Tree.” Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, edited by Trevor Schoonmaker, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2013.
Stiles K. Wangechi Mutu’s Family Tree. In: Schoonmaker T, editor. Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey. Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; 2013.
Journal cover image

ISBN

978-0938989363

Publication Date

2013

Publisher

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University