Wangechi Mutu

From Nairobi to New York: Who Controls the Image of the Body?

Wangechi Mutu grew up in Nairobi, studied in the United States in the 1990s, and developed a body of collage-centered work in New York in the early 2000s. Art21 describes her work as creating hybrid images of women’s bodies that combine human, botanical, animal, and mechanical elements while addressing cultural identity, colonial history, and consumption^*10.

The 2025 Aichi Triennale presented Mutu as an artist working between New York and Nairobi whose hybrid human-animal forms draw on East African folklore, gender, anthropology, environmental science, and politics^*26 Looking across her work to the present shows that questions first developed through collage have persisted in altered form through sculpture and film.

For photographic history, Mutu’s importance lies in her attention to how Black women have already appeared within circulated photographs, rather than in producing new portraits with a camera. The National Museum of Women in the Arts notes that she draws material from fashion magazines, National Geographic, medical publications, and other sources, and has spoken of the urgency she feels around how women of color are represented in print^*13.

The Studio Museum in Harlem likewise describes her hybrid Black female figures, assembled from fashion photography and medical imagery, as opening new possibilities against inherited forms of representation^*14 The “photography” Mutu confronts is therefore less a matter of camera technique than an accumulated visual culture that classified bodies and circulated them as objects of desire through magazines, ethnography, medicine, and advertising.

Why Collage: Beginning by Cutting Existing Images

In interviews, Mutu has described the need to produce images from a situation in which representations of Black women were either scarce or already distorted. Her statement in MAFF’s Cultural Cutouts about “producing that image out of the very lack of it” concisely identifies the starting point of her collage practice^*3.

Cutting is not a decorative effect here. The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia explains that Mutu takes fragments from high-fashion, hunting, and motorcycle magazines as well as ethnographic publications that historically described groups of people through cultural and racial categories, bringing different standards of the body into collision within a single image^*15.

In a conversation at The Met, her work is similarly discussed through the “critical eye”: the question of who looks at women, by what standards they are evaluated, and why inherited images cannot be treated as neutral^*1 By cutting existing photographs and joining them to different eyes, skin, hair, and organs, Mutu uses the damaged visual archive itself as material for constructing another body.

This form also belongs to the history of photomontage, in which photographic fragments are cut and recombined to produce new images and meanings. MoMA places Mutu after figures such as Hannah Höch, who created political collisions from mass-media fragments, and Romare Bearden, who reconstructed Black experience through fragmentation and layered imagery^*4 Mutu’s specific problem in the 2000s was not simply to use found photographs as material for a general critique of media. Colonial ethnography, pornography, and fashion magazines had each partitioned the Black female body through different systems. Bringing fragments from those systems together made their contradictions visible.

In a BOMB oral history, Mutu recalls producing large numbers of cyborg-like and chimeric bodies on Mylar around 2002, incorporating poses and textures drawn from fashion magazines^*29 Mylar is a synthetic film that absorbs little liquid, leaving the joins between photographic fragments and paint visibly unresolved. SFMOMA similarly described collage in its 2005 exhibition as a medium involving “rupture and collision”^*28 The formal seams preserve the collision between different standards of the body.

Histology: Bringing Medical Classification into Collision with the Pinup

Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors (2004–05) consists of twelve collages combining medical illustrations of uterine tumors with eyes, noses, mouths, hair, and other fragments cut from magazines. National Galleries of Scotland presents the series as a major work and describes how the format of pathological classification is transformed into portraiture^*6.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art also holds Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors as a drawing/collage work, showing the series’ continued presence within discussions of contemporary African art^*27.

Art Fund notes that the number twelve refers to the months of a pinup calendar and that many of the images incorporate fragments of Black women’s facial features^*7.

The collision between medical illustration and the glamour image reveals how both diagnostic classification and the commercial evaluation of attractiveness operate through printed images. The collaged faces are not portraits of individuals; they expose the structures through which several institutions have partitioned the body.

Beauty and Damage Together: Refusing a Simple Moral Reading of Looking

MoMA Magazine discusses Mutu’s work as a feminist challenge in which seductive surfaces and traces of violence appear together, emphasizing how collage and photomontage prevent the image of the body from settling into a stable form^*4.

Pérez Art Museum Miami’s You tried so hard to make us away (2005) layers faces and bodies cut from Glamour, Vogue, National Geographic, travel books, and motorcycle magazines with ink, acrylic, glitter, and other materials^*23 The work’s simultaneous sense of beauty and damage arises from a material collision between photographic fragments made for different purposes and joined into a single body.

A long essay in Border Crossings traces how, from Pin-ups (2001) onward, Mutu used fragments from fashion, travel, pornographic, and other magazines to construct human-animal hybrids that gather questions of African politics, gender, and sexuality within a single body^*16.

Mutu’s figures remain beautiful and unsettling at once. She retains the seductive force of advertising and fashion imagery while cutting and joining it to incompatible parts, making the historical biases embedded in visual desire harder to overlook.

From Photographic Fragments to Sculpture: Moving the Body beyond the Flat Image

In an Art21 video, Mutu describes the development of her work from early collage paintings through photographic experiments and into sculpture in earth and bronze^*11.

The Nasher Museum’s Family Tree (2012) consists of thirteen works on paper, extending the hybrid body from a singular exception into the structure of a “family” made up of multiple related figures^*22.

In the Whitney Museum’s discussion of Sentinels, Mutu describes her work as a long effort to restore “wholeness” to what has been broken: her own histories, movement away from home, and cultural worlds shaped by colonization^*2.

This change is not a linear progression in which collage is abandoned for sculpture. The problem of constructing bodies from fragments on paper expands in three dimensions into questions of which materials to join, which cultural forms to cite, and what kind of body to place in space. The task that began with photographic fragments—making another body while inheriting existing images—continues across media.

Exhibition as Medium: From A Fantastic Journey to Intertwined

When A Fantastic Journey traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, it was presented at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, bringing collage, film, wall drawing, and installation into a single exhibition centered on gender, colonialism, and representations of Black women’s bodies^*8.

Organized by the Nasher Museum in 2013, A Fantastic Journey was the first U.S. survey of Mutu’s work, bringing together more than fifty works in multiple media dating from the mid-1990s onward^*21.

The Smithsonian Libraries catalog record describes the exhibition through Mutu’s movement across magazine clippings, African traditions, global politics, fashion, and science fiction^*25.

The New Museum’s 2023 retrospective Intertwined brought together more than one hundred works, reconnecting works on paper with sculpture, film, and installation across the span of Mutu’s career^*9.

A Brooklyn Rail review likewise noted the exhibition’s refusal to isolate collage, sculpture, and film into separate chronological categories, emphasizing their interweaving instead^*18.

Intertwined traveled to the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2024, where roughly one hundred works from the mid-1990s to the present traced how questions of classification and colonialism from the early collages continued across media^*24.

Examining Photographic Power from a Position outside Documentary

In an interview with The Guardian, Mutu states that she does not consider herself a documentarian or photojournalist, while discussing why she works with images, bodies, and myths associated with Africa^*17.

The Tang Teaching Museum collection database records individual works from Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors as combinations of collage and digital print^*12 The collection records confirm the series’ combination of pathological titles and printed images of the body.

MoMA places Mutu within several overlapping histories, including the African diaspora—the cultures formed through the migration and dispersal of people of African descent—along with collage and feminist art, resisting a reduction of her work to a single region or technique^*19 From this perspective, the politics of photography concern not only what new images are made, but also whom existing images have turned into types and whom they have left absent.

Reassessment: Collage as the Reediting of Colonial Imagery

In The Met’s The Artist Project, Mutu looks at representations of the body by artists including Egon Schiele and discusses how vulnerability and humanity can be read in the figure, indicating that her work also engages Western art history^*5.

In 2024, the National Gallery selected Mutu for its Contemporary Fellowship, inviting her to engage the historical collection from the perspective of a contemporary artist^*20.

Calling the work a critique of colonialism alone misses the specificity of the method. Cut photographic edges, differences between printed surfaces, and seams across faces and bodies make the continued presence of inherited imagery materially visible.

Within photographic history, the question extends beyond who held the camera. It also includes whose bodies later artists identify in images circulated through ethnography, medicine, advertising, and fashion, and how those images can be recovered, dismantled, and rebuilt.

Photographic scholarship has also read this method as a response to inherited colonial photography. Kanitra Fletcher argues that by cutting, pasting, and drawing over images of Black women derived from ethnography and pornography, Mutu reverses the structure in which the body is “captured” by the camera, foregrounding transformation and agency over photography’s claim to truth^*30 In this reading, the seams of collage are not decorative. They become the sites where historically fixed images of the body are shown to be editable.

MoMA now also places works such as Yo Mama and Eve within Afrofuturism, which reconnects Black histories and cultures to speculative visions of the future^*19 This was not the work’s sole identification at the time it was made, but it is a later interpretation that recognizes how dismantling colonial imagery can also become a way of constructing different futures for Black bodies.