Annual Bransten Lecture with artist Wangechi Mutu

Join us on our seventh annual Bransten Lecture as we take an in-depth look at the Legion of Honor's new exhibition,“WANGECHI MUTU: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?”, led by the artist herself.
Over the past two decades, Wangechi Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings, and fantastical landscapes. With a rare understanding of the power and need for new mythologies-the productive friction of opposites beyond simple binaries and stereotypes-Mutu breaches common distinctions among human, animal, plant, and machine. At once seductive and threatening, her figures and environments take the viewer on journeys of material, psychological, and sociopolitical transformation. An artist who calls both Nairobi and New York home, she moves voraciously between cultural traditions to challenge colonialist, racist, and sexist worldviews with her visionary projection of an alternate universe informed by Afrofuturism, post-humanism, and feminism. Mutu’s sprawling exhibition at the Legion of Honor, a museum built for the showcase of European art from antiquity through Impressionism presided over by Auguste Rodin's “The Thinker”, aims to spur “a purposeful examination of art histories, mythologies, and the techniques of archiving and remembering.”
About the Artist
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Wangechi Mutu received her MFA from Yale University.
Mutu’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and installations worldwide, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Contemporary Austin, Texas; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina. Other venues include the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Kunsthalle Wien. Mutu was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and is the recipient of Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year award, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, and the American Federation of Arts Cultural Leadership Award. The artist works in Nairobi and New York.
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[@ericmacharia2968]

Am a Kenyan Artist and am inspired

[@karibyron215]

I can’t wait for this opening. She is my favorite contemporary artist.

[@sarahthomson8183]

Me too.

[@pizzaduke188]

Her art at the Legion is so amazing!

[@julieunderhill1198]

I attended the exhibit. It was so powerful!!

[@lindaglatt2419]

Loved the exhibition!

[@sharongillesp]

Would love to have heard/seen more.
Most gripping lecture ever…not simply the endless stop and go of slides with little commentary with only a ledger of typical imagery.