At this summer’s Art For Life event, hosted by Russell Simmons at Rush Philanthropic, the influential Wangechi Mutu has been selected as the honorary ‘Featured Artist’. Each year, the philanthropy selects a single artist to generously create and donate an original artwork to display at the Art For Life Benefit Event in the Hamptons.
Mutu is a Kenyan-born artist and currently lives and works in New York. She received an IB Diploma at the United World College, and then went on to gain her BFA at the Cooper Union in New York. In 2000, Mutu received her MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. Since then her work has been featured all over the globe in over 30 solo exhibitions and an impressive amount of group exhibitions. She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York, Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles, and Victoria Miro in London.
Through her own unique collage style, Mutu embraces the female figure both figuratively and literally. She creates a wide range of artworks including sculpture, large scale installations, short films, works on paper, and collage paintings using a plethora of mixed media for all. And I truly mean a plethora – Mutu has been known to use human hair, cut outs from National Geographic magazine, red wine, tinsel, different clothing apparel, jewelry, furniture, seemingly anything she can get her hands on.
Her inventive use of materials is representative of her empowering ability to convey her feelings about gender, race, colonization, war, global consumption, and beauty. Mutu has the ability to transform the subjective into a poetic masterpiece both critically and passionately.
Wangechi Mutu is the recipient of the United States Artist Grant (2014), the Brooklyn Museum’s Asher B. Durand Artist of the Year Award (2013), and was honored as Deutsche Bank’s first Artist of the Year (2010).
Click here for additional information on the Art For Life foundation and their event on July 18th.