Registration for this event will open on Monday, October 5 at 12 PM.
Photography by Khadija Farah
Renowned Nairobi and Brooklyn-based visual artist Wangechi Mutu presents recent work, including film, sculpture, and installation at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Response by Rachel Grace Newman, Assistant Professor, African American and African Diaspora Studies. Introduced by Sarah Cole, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts and Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature.
Speak Now is a new speaker series at Columbia University School of the Arts. Speak Now features artists whose work reaches a broad public and embodies the spirit of adventurous creativity that is the hallmark of the School of the Arts.
About the artist:
Wangechi Mutu's work is constantly tearing, repairing, and testing ideas, images, histories, materials, recollections and methods of representation, particularly of the female form. Mutu’s techniques unbind rules of figuration and representation through a consistent and well-honed practice of experimentation. Employing Art as a salve, an archive, an archeology and a social critique, Mutu relies on a masterful use of her multi-media lexicon. One that encompasses a variety of techniques and mediums including sculpture, film, installation, collage-painting and performance.
Internationally renowned for her practice, where invented environments, mechanisms, and whimsical creatures are immersed in dystopian dreamscapes, Mutu continues to use her exceptional skill to describe and distinguish our shared impulse to recollect, to rebel, to remark and to react.
Mutu has participated in several major solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide, most recently Wangechi Mutu: Black Soil Poems at Galleria Borghese in Rome, Italy; Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined at both New Museum in New York and New Orleans Museum of Art. Additionally, Wangechi Mutu at Storm King Art Center in New York; The Façade Commission: Wangechi Mutu, The NewOnes, will free Us at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? at the Legion of Honor Museum at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.