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I’m a visual artist from Kenya named Wangechi Mutu.
I actually don’t know how long I’ve been making art for.
I just remember I always made art and I didn’t think anything of it because it was just this
continual thing that I love to do.
But I think I came to the decision that I am an artist in my late teens when I was in
school in Wales. And I moved to the U.S. in the nineties to
come and study art and anthropology.
From then it was this amazing experience, journey, story that I’m living now which
has taken me from sort of a very emerging and struggling artist to the practice and
the purpose I have at this point in time.
I have an exhibition currently at the Nature Museum in North Carolina called, “A Fantastic
Journey,” and in a way it’s sort of a title to wrap around the way I approach
all of the work that I make, using the lens of fiction and the surreal, the unreal,
and futuristic as a way of looking at the world.
It’s my first U.S. solo exhibition, so it’s a survey of work that I’ve done over a long
period of time, all the way from the nineties in the form of these small sketchbook
drawings to my large collages, my big life-size, bodacious girls are in there,
and my installation work is also featured in the form of these footballs, which are
made from garbage bags.
There’s video work, all the way to the most recent animation piece that I made with Santigold
called, “The End of Eating Everything.” I’m a believer in creativity and the ability
for artists to sort of transform their experiences in others.
So all of that falls into why I know I’m an artist and why I love doing what I do.