The Savannah College of Art and Design-Atlanta presents “The Cinderella Curse” by Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu at the ACA Gallery of SCAD located in the Woodruff Arts Center at 1280 Peachtree St. NE. from May 9 – June 24. An opening reception will be held May 9, 6-8 p.m. Mutu will also give a lecture on May 15 at 7 p.m. at SCAD-Atlanta, located at 1600 Peachtree St. NW.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Wangechi Mutu trained as both a sculptor and anthropologist. Mutu uses collage through images cut from fashion and pornography magazines, National Geographic, and books about African art, to bring layered depth to her work. She examines issues of African politics as well as class, race, gender and sexuality in America through the eyes of an outsider – a middle-class African, with a private Catholic school upbringing whose ideas about class and race were radically reset when she arrived in the United States in 1992 as an adult. By piecing together these images Mutu creates figures that are constantly shape-shifting in order to exist, with prosthetics and mutilations making them a little more frightening with each incarnation.
“My work embodies the questions beneath identity ‘loss’ and crisis; origin and ownership of cultural signifiers become unsettling and dubious terrain,” said Mutu. “The work describes the beauty and survival capabilities of the human imagination which outlives assaulted cultures, transplantation, exile and shifts in philosophical paradigms.”
Mutu has been featured in publications such as Vogue, Interview Magazine, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Art Review and The New Yorker. Mutu’s work is also part of the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art and The Saatchi Gallery in London.
For more information about Wangechi Mutu or SCAD-Atlanta exhibitions, visit http://www.scad.edu/exhibitions
About the college
Named “Hottest for Studying Art” among America’s 25 Hottest Colleges by Kaplan/Newsweek, the Savannah College of Art and Design is a private, nonprofit, accredited institution with locations in Atlanta and Savannah, Ga., and in Lacoste, France. Accredited undergraduate and graduate degree programs also are offered online through SCAD e-Learning. The college offers Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Fine Arts, Master of Architecture, Master of Arts, Master of Fine Arts and Master of Urban Design degrees. For more information about the college, visit http://www.scad.edu .
Nicole Teigen
Media Relations Manager
SCAD-Atlanta
404.253.3250