Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu. And I'm so thrilled you're about to hear from visual artist Wangeshi Mutu. Her TED 2023 talk illuminates the way art can speak across time and across cultural boundaries. After the talk, she sat down with me offstage to break down the backstory of her work, work that really empowers women and shows us a way to the future.
Chapter 2: What journey inspired Wangechi Mutu's exploration of ancient art?
And if you happen to be in New York City, check out her show at the New Museum, stretching across the entire museum and open until June 4th. All that after a short break. I believe art is an ancient language that we use to communicate with each other into the future. A year ago, I took a magnificent journey with a friend. where we went to see some prehistoric art.
We went deep into the desert of Niger to look for art that had been created tens of thousands of years ago. The journey was filled with long conversations, Tuareg music and our whimsical shadow dances, and lots of laughter.
As we drove deep into the Sahara, we found delicate drawings scratched into the gray rock faces, art made at a time when the Sahel was filled with people and their cattle, full of lakes and forests and home to hippos and giraffes. We saw engravings of characters made with intricate, detailed patterns, a sign that whomever had carved them knew one day they would be seen and admired.
These ancient voices from the past spoke of the wealth and the bounty that existed, showing the importance of making, recording and representing ourselves. Art is that ancient language that we've been using for longer than written text. We've left messages for each other, using art. Messages that travel across the expanse of time and culture, reminding us where we come from.
As long as I can remember, I've been making art, and I've always made art about women. I've created figures with female bodies that sometimes look like pregnant creatures or wounded and then repaired women. I've made hybrid humans and even fierce feminine machines.
all to show how the female body is a powerful site onto which culture expresses its feelings of worthiness, of desire or distaste, of divinity or decrepitude, of belonging or loss. The images I make, like the ones I saw carved on those ancient desert rocks, are essentially the representation of the presence of the female in all of us.
Growing up in Nairobi in the 1970s, Kenya had every appearance of a happy, wholesome, modernized country. We had fought, reclaimed and celebrated our independence from a tyrannical British rule. But there were, and there still are, old skeletons and colonial traumas rattling in our closets. When I was 10 years old, whilst our second president was in office, there was an attempted and failed coup.
The president behaved increasingly paranoid and authoritarian, and he placed restrictions on all types of freedoms of expression. people began to disappear. Journalists, preachers, artists, teachers. Even my relatives, who were vocal about the government, began to vanish. Kenyan people were rendered invisible, small and silent. And I wanted to get out.
And I did, through my mind, by creating art and imagining places I could go where I could communicate freely and fearlessly. Within a few years' time, I found myself in New York, and though I immediately felt far and removed from my country, my mind remained clear and determined, because I'd carried inside of me the language of my ancestral home.
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Chapter 3: How does Wangechi Mutu connect ancient art to modern women's experiences?
Slicing out pictures from magazines and books found on the streets of the city, I transformed them into large paintings with figures that were disjointed but whole, distorted but strangely beautiful. I stuck these fragments into imaginary environments that seemed frightening and violent but always alluring and otherworldly.
It was my way of creating order and grace, a way to remember who and where I'd come from, mending and healing in order to triumph. After harvesting so much paper and producing so, so many collages, I felt it was time to step back and let go, time to purge and shred this excess paper and these materials that I'd collected for years,
And I did, turning it all into a dark, thick paper clay, which I used to create my first large sculpture, a reclining woman with open arms and her eyes facing forward, a figure who could see a new beginning on its way, titled, She's Got the Whole World in Her.
As I visited and returned from my childhood home, I came back with all types of rocks and branches, pots and beads, and each shell, each bone, each feather I found, I used in the work, weaving back that deep connection to my home soil. I sculpted these giant earth queens, and placed the small mementos inside of them, archiving my memories and experiences with family and friends.
Our bodies once carried all of our art. Our bodies are our oldest museums. I made these sculptures to represent our fractured and remade histories and our connection to each other and our red mud. Each of them, a portrait of the resilience and the diversity of African women formed from these particles of mother continent.
shaped like old trees, shaped like my sisters and my grandmothers, like anthills and women friends, like the coral reef and the Great Rift Valley, shaped like me. I gave them large, elaborate feet so they could stand steady, strong. As I spent more time reconnecting with this home I'd come back to, I conjured up more supernatural characters. This time, in bronze.
Like my smooth, shiny water woman, a version of the mythical Nguva of East African lore. A creature with the power to delight us, to instruct or destroy us, who speaks directly to sea creatures and the water itself. I created another sea goddess and named her Mama Ray, with mystical shell eyes that see into the past and know the future, with wings so wide they could carry us across the ocean.
And then next, I created a great woman crocodile with striped armor, like long words cut into her body to remind us of our land, our land that remembers us. In 2018, the Metropolitan Museum of Art invited me to their first commission ever to create new sculptures that would sit in the building's facade. These niches that had remained empty for over 100 years, I created four seated deities,
all wearing golden crowns of light, robed in rippling bronze garments, made to reflect the sun. The first with a bright disk over her mouth. The second with a golden mirror on her eyes. The third with a radiant crown. and the fourth with a circular light beam on her forehead. These works stood for tranquility, dignity, Africanity and the feminine divine.
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Chapter 4: What cultural and historical influences shaped Wangechi Mutu's art?
I usually take about three to two years to make a bronze work. Two to three years. Wow. Exactly. But there was something about the ask. And I'm one of these people. I'm like, that seems impossible. Maybe I should try and do it. You know, that was so important. And it was difficult to say no. And luckily, I draw a lot.
And in my sketchbooks, I have ideas that are just a little embryo sitting in there, you know. And I often go back into my old sketchbooks and find ideas that I even forgot I had thought about making. Right. asked me for three, she gave me three choices in the museum, the facade, there was a space inside and it's something else.
And she said, if you have anything that could work, we've got a couple of artists we're looking at and you, and you, and we'd love to see what your proposal is. And I, sent her these three drawings, actually. And she said, oh my God, this is great. And I said, wonderful. I think I know I could do with them.
And then when they came out, you mentioned in your talk, they came out just before a global lockdown and a global pandemic. And so the art really spoke to the context of the time too, or was in conversation with the context of the time. That was largely just a coincidence. Absolutely. It was, in fact, what was really interesting for me, quite difficult.
And they agreed to this, is that the commission was supposed to be completed, I think, by September or something, October. And it was only going to be up for about four or five months. And I remember saying, that's not enough time. But I just also didn't want to get into the discussion of, well, how much longer? But anyway, the pandemic is the reason why they ended up sitting. Yeah.
Out in the open. The whole museum was closed. Most museums are closed. Right. So these were those rare artworks that people got to see every day for months. Yeah. And in a way, they became quite symbolic. People would, you know, email or text me or take pictures and say, oh, my God, it's so nice to see that there's these artworks that we can look at.
There's one particular of those pieces that has a disc that would reflect the sun around 8 to 8.30 a.m. in the morning. That almost seems faded, right? I knew that would happen, but it became such a spiritual and mystical and symbolic aspect to the work. So people would say, oh, my God, I walked by it again and it was reflecting the sun. So it's very beautiful and beautiful.
But I do believe in those kinds of serendipitous moments in art. I think that there is something about art that lines up sometimes with these very difficult cultural and historical moments, and it pushes us through somehow or another. Okay.
So before we let you go, for those who are just getting introduced to you and your work through your talk and this conversation, what is your overarching thesis or message that you want your art to sort of say? And when it outlasts you and outlives you, what do you hope the message is that you leave with your audiences and those who interact with your art? That's a huge question.
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Chapter 5: How did Wangechi Mutu's childhood in Kenya impact her artistic journey?
And I know that every single person has experience. that kind of capability in some area of their life. And I also know that the solutions to solving anything, you know, any problem, that those things can come out of that particular skill and gift that you have. And for me, that skill is great.
very much bound into me being an African woman, being raised where I was raised, being raised by women who I think they passed on the baton to me, but they didn't get to shine in their own way because that wasn't the time where they couldn't or things were not built around them in that way. So I know that art is this really powerful gift that I have to offer.
And it is something that can help people to what we have in some ways as a kind of vessel of solutions that we have. And I also think it's my way of loving people and healing people and myself. And I think that's what I'm trying to do with the work is to find a way to create... a sense that we can solve this, we can figure this out.
The scientists have incredible solutions and so do the priests and the theologians and so forth. But I think in my case, art really is... It's a way to find answers to create a more humane world. And hopefully to inspire young girls. I mean, that was one of the hardest things, I think. And it doesn't show as much when you're doing the things that you're doing and they're going well.
But it was such a tough, it was tough for me to commit myself. to being an artist when it was so unfashionable and it was not supported by my family and by the culture. And it still isn't. But I think I also want to make sure that young girls can see that you could be badass as an artist. You could really do some cool things. This is a path. Yes, absolutely. All right.
Wangeshi Mutu, thank you so much. It was a delight. You're most welcome. Genomics pioneer Robert Green says many parents want their healthy newborn's DNA screened for diseases that may or may not show up later in life. There is an argument that knowledge is power, and many families would like to know everything, whether it's treatable or not. The debate over revealing the secrets in babies' DNA.
That's next time on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. Subscribe or listen to the TED Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts.
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