A new exhibition at Storm King Art Center showcases the work of Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu and foregrounds her creative engagement with the natural world. Mutu has installed eight large-scale bronze sculptures across Storm King’s expansive grounds that explore ideas of historical violence and its impact on women, mythology, and ritual. The exhibition continues indoors in the Museum Building galleries with additional sculpted pieces by the artist and two films.

In a feature for the New York Times Style Magazine, Mutu reflects on some of the themes in her work—resilience, survival, storytelling—and how her art allows her to “pass that love, sorrow, pain and urgency on to other people.”

The exhibition is on view until November 7, 2022.

Wangechi Mutu, the Kenyan-born multidisciplinary artist best known for her clay and bronze sculptures and collage paintings, has been going to Storm King Art Center, in New York’s Hudson Valley, since she was a student at Cooper Union, and later Yale, in the 1990s. “It calls people back and back again, like a place of pilgrimage,” she says of the open-air museum less than two hours from Manhattan, speaking via Zoom from her apartment in Brooklyn — her studio is in the same brownstone, though she also keeps a studio in Nairobi. Now, having just finished installing eight large-scale bronze sculptures on Storm King’s Museum Hill, one part of the complex’s 500 acres — which are also home to pieces by Lynda Benglis, Alexander Calder and Sol LeWitt, among others — she’s come full circle.

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