Kenyan-American multidisciplinary artist Wangechi Mutu becomes the first living female artist to exhibit at the Galleria Borghese in Rome. ‘Black Soil Poems,’ her solo exhibition curated by Cloé Perrone, opened on June 10 and runs until September 14, 2025, at the world-famous art museum.
It features multimedia works of sculpture, installation, and moving image on display at the 17th-century museum’s façade, rooms, and garden. Known for her fantastical, life-size sculptures, some of them here are placed on surfaces, and others are hanging from the ceilings, giving visitors new visual experiences in the static, historical space.
“It challenges classical tradition (of the museum) through suspensions, fragmented forms, and newly imagined mythologies, establishing a multilayered dialogue between the artist’s contemporary language and the symbolic institutional authority,” reads the museum’s curatorial statement.
Here are five more striking things about Wangechi Mutu.
Soil is her medium
Wangechi doesn’t describe herself as a “city girl with a nature brain” for nothing. She incorporates natural and organic materials—bronze, wood, feathers, soil, water, paper, and wax—for her sculptures and collages. Her use of soil strongly bears history in her practice, majorly exploring Kenyan soil and red volcano soil in her bodies of work, including in ‘Black Soil Poems.’
Her liking for found objects
She uses recycled objects to create thought-provoking, timeless sculptures, collages, and other mixed-media works. The messaging behind her art has been about rethinking consumerism and its impact on the environment.
She loves films
Wangechi has also explored films and performances apart from collages and sculptures. In the ‘Black Soil Poems,’ the video titled ‘The End of eating Everything’ is also part of the showcase. In the video shown at The Museum of Contemporary Art, it shows singer Santigold in a gloomy otherworldly planet raising her artistic voice against pollution and environmental degradation.
Femininity as her core theme
Femininity is a strong feature in her works. Her subjects are female forms that portray powerful poses and resilience.
In ‘Black Soil Poems,’ bronze sculptures are on display outdoors, on the museum’s façade, and in the Secret Gardens. ‘The Seated I’ and ‘The Seated IV,’ which show women in poised postures with their bodies carved in the form of traditional royal adornments, were originally presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2019.
As part of this exhibition, on the floor of the American Academy in Rome lies a bronze sculpture, ‘Shavasana I,’ of a woman covered by a mat to symbolise death and the dignity of life.
In an interview with Louisiana Channel, she explained that she intends to illuminate Black female experiences.
“I guess my obsession with the Black female body is the kind of obsession with myself navigating the world in a very sort of processed form so that I don’t do biographical or self-portrait kind of work, but I am questioning and asking and sort of resolving the issue of our invisibility by making the work,” she said.
She thrives internationally
The Yale University alumnus has won many accolades in her practice that spans over 25 years. Her long list of past solo exhibitions includes Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C. (2019); ‘Intertwined’ at The New Museum, New York (2024); 56th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (2015); ); Museum of Contemporary Art, Cape Town (2017); Whitney Biennial (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2013); and Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (2019).
Two years ago, she exhibited over 100 works for ‘Intertwined’ at The New Museum in New York. In 2012, she introduced her survey, ‘Entitled A Fantastic Journey,’ at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, where she displayed over 50 works she made since the mid-1990s.