Wangechi Mutu Archives – Daily Art Fixx

What do you see? is a children’s book that brings to life the surreal art of Wangechi Mutu (featured). Written by Kyla Ryman, each page of this unusual seek-and-find book reveals a small part of Mutu’s artwork Le Noble Savage (2006), allowing readers to explore each part of the collage work closely. On the final page, the entire piece is revealed, opening up even more room for discussion and exploration.

What do you see? may challenge some expectations of what a children’s book should be. While young creative minds can engage with the art book in a simple way—looking at colours, and the fun game of spotting images within the pages—the book may also serve as an opportunity to engage in early conversations about race, gender, and body image, topics that figure prominently in Mutu’s artwork.

About Wangechi Mutu: Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Mutu scrutinizes globalization by combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery. Sampling such diverse sources as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, pornography, and science fiction, her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the exoticization of the black female body. Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation. Her work is represented in museum collections around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the MoMA in New York City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. (via Brooklyn Museum)

About Kyla Ryman: During her work within homeschool collectives as a reading specialist, Kyla saw a need for creative and compelling reading content for children. In 2012, she founded Home Grown Books to develop resources that empowered parents and inspired little readers. Kyla is a mother of two boys and an advocate of organic learning for children. She embraces thinking, playing, and creating as the building blocks for learning. Kyla has a Masters in Early Childhood Education and a Reading Specialty from Bank Street College. She taught for 12 years in the public school system, tutored, and worked with a homeschool collective.

What do you see? is part of Home Grown Books Mini Museum Series, bringing contemporary art to creative kids.

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

DAF is pleased to offer the chance to win one (1) free copy of What do you see? to DAF readers, courtesy of Home Grown Books. To enter, click on the link below. The winner will be contacted for shipping information. One entry per person only. Contest entry deadline is November 5, 2016. Winner will be drawn randomly and announced on November 15, 2016. Good luck everyone!

ENTER THE CONTEST!

Disclosure: No payment was made to Daily Art Fixx for featuring this book. A copy of the book was provided to the editors for review.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Wangechi Mutu moved to New York in the mid-1990s. She received her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2000.

“Mutu’s work explores the contradictions of female and cultural identity and makes reference to colonial history, contemporary African politics and the international fashion industry. Drawing from the aesthetics of traditional crafts, science fiction and funkadelia, Mutu’s works document the contemporary myth making of endangered cultural heritage.

Piecing together magazine imagery with painted surfaces and found materials, Mutu’s elaborate collages mimic amputation, transplant operations and bionic prosthetics. Her figures become satirical mutilations. Their forms are grotesquely marred through perverse modification, echoing the atrocities of war or self-inflicted improvements of plastic surgery. Mutu examines how ideology is very much tied to corporeal form. She cites a European preference to physique that has been inflicted on and adapted by Africans, resulting in both social hierarchy and genocide.

Mutu’s figures are equally repulsive and attractive. From corruption and violence, Mutu creates a glamorous beauty. Her figures are empowered by their survivalist adaptation to atrocity, immunised and ‘improved’ by horror and victimisation. Their exaggerated features are appropriated from lifestyle magazines and constructed from festive materials such as fairy dust and fun fur. Mutu uses materials which refer to African identity and political strife: dazzling black glitter symbolises western desire which simultaneously alludes to the illegal diamond trade and its terrible consequences. Her work embodies a notion of identity crisis, where origin and ownership of cultural signifiers becomes an unsettling and dubious terrain.” (bio from Satchi Gallery)

Mutu’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous major art museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2010, Mutu was selected as Deutsche Bank Group’s Artist of the Year.

To see more of Wangechi Mutu’s work, visit WangechiMutu.com or Satchi Gallery.