Wangechi Mutu

A black boy learns contradicting lessons of manhood and masculinity on the day of his cousin's funeral.

A look back at the last fifty years in African American art, Colored Frames is an unflinching exploration of influences, inspirations and experiences of black artists. Beginning at the height of the Civil Rights Era and leading up to the present, it is a naked and truthful look at often ignored artists and their progenies.

This narrative restraint appears perhaps most clearly in Wangechi Mutu’s video Cutting, in which the artist enters the frame and proceeds to rhythmically hack away at a log in an expansive desert landscape before finally laying down her machete and leaving the frame.

Set at Mount Suswa, a holy site in Kenya, the film centers histories that have been lost and the beginning process of reclamation. A meditation on reconnection, the film recounts moments from recent and distant Kenyan history. Narrated by the off-screen voice of a young child, it presents moments of frustration but also of hope, leaving space for a renewal of wisdom that has been lost. Additionally, My Cave Call weaves in spirituality, questioning in what ways humans have become disconnected from their roots with the earth. The film’s setting—first in a field and then in a cave (under Mount Suswa)—creates a surreal journey. This film was part of a larger exhibition of Wangechi Mutu’s work at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

Live-action/CG animation music video for the artist Santigold, which has been shown in museums such as Nasher Museum of Art, who initially commissioned the piece.

In Amazing Grace, Mutu brings to life powerful video art rooted in the origins of the Atlantic slave trade that casts the ocean as a paradoxical character. Mutu describes the ocean as both a birthplace for all organisms as well as a site of unfathomable destruction as the pathway for the slave trade and for migrant boats. Throughout Amazing Grace, Mutu immerses herself slowly into the sea while singing the Christian hymn referenced in the title in her native language, Kikuyu, in an act of self-baptism and meditation.