Impossible Voyages: Wangechi Mutu at Storm King

Abstract

Impossible VoyagesWangechi Mutu at Storm King Irina Sheynfeld (bio) "My work is for my daughters and my sons and the next generation who will hopefully continue to create new ways of telling our histories and of stitching us all back together."1 —Wangechi Mutu Kenyan-born American multidisciplinary visual artist Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972) brings her fantastical menagerie of beings to the expansive landscape of Storm King Art Center, an open-air museum about ninety miles north of New York City. The artist divides her time in the studio between Nairobi and New York City and in her practice, she incorporates elements from both worlds. Her work has been described as deeply feminist and informed by both Afrofuturism—a cultural aesthetic that combines science fiction, history, and fantasy to explore the African American experience—and Symbiocene, a term coined in 2011 by Glen Albrecht, that describes a new era in human history that is characterized by harmonious interactions between humans and all other living beings. Eight large-scale sculptures populate the museum hill and about twenty additional works, including two films, span two floors of the main museum building. This is perhaps one of the artist's most comprehensive solo shows to date. Mutu's work is an intervention into Storm King's pastoral, hilly landscape and it encourages a conversation between museums past and present. It also makes us think anew about the importance of ritual and its creation, as well as the new meaning of one's journey through life. In her practice, Mutu doesn't just rethink existing mythologies but she often creates new ones. She conjures fantastical, futuristic female beings and creates worlds for them to travel through. Mutu deals with themes of reinventing the journey, rewriting mythology, and reconstructing ritual. The artist creates new creatures on a voyage through unknown territory. Both of her most recent sculptural groups, In Two Canoe (2022) and Crocodylus (2020), depict travelers whose destination and purpose are [End Page 101] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. In Two Canoe, 2022 Bronze 180 × 68 × 72 in (457.2 × 172.7 × 182.9 cm) Edition 1/3 unknown, while Shavasana I and II (2019) present us with those whose journey has just ended. On top of Museum Hill, at the center of the park and right in front of the museum building, there is a fifteen-foot-long bronze fountain, In Two Canoe. It consists of two patinated olive-green humanoid female figures seated inside a water-filled boat. Both women's legs are spread wide and hang down over the sides of the canoe into the earth as slender mangrove roots. In an interview with the New York Times, Mutu explains that, "Mangroves are migratory. This plant has moved everywhere and has made journeys like those who were kidnapped from Africa and taken to the Americas. The water seals this unified story we've created for ourselves. We are all connected on this sphere of earth and the water is how we go and find each other." But where are two giantesses going in a boat that is filled to the brim with water? The unexpected placement of the water—inside rather than outside of the boat—makes one wonder how these woodland leaf-covered aliens are going to get anywhere. Does it mean that their mysterious journey is doomed from the get-go? Mutu's beings are simultaneously awe- and fear-inspiring. The couple in Canoe recalls a small stone plaque from the mid-fourteenth century [End Page 102] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. In Two Canoe, 2022 Bronze 180 × 68 × 72 in (457.2 × 172.7 × 182.9 cm) Edition 1/3 BCE, Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Their Three Daughters Under the Strahlenaton. The stele, which is housed at the Neues Museum in Berlin, is unique in the three-thousand-year history of Egyptian Art, as it depicts Pharaoh and his wife not idealized in a canonical way but as equals seated in front of each other.2 One notices a striking resemblance between the figures [End Page 103] of Mutu's Canoe and those depicted on the Akhenaten plaque; they share...