Date of Award
12-2009
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Art and Design
First Advisor
Susan Richmond - Chair
Second Advisor
Amira Jarmakani
Third Advisor
Kimberly Cleveland
Abstract
Wangechi Mutu is an internationally recognized Kenyan-born artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. She creates collaged female figures composed of human, animal, object, and machine parts. Mutu’s constructions of the female body provide a transcultural critique on the female persona in Western culture. This paper contextualizes Mutu’s work and artistic strategies within feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial narratives on collage, while exploring whether collage strategies are particularly useful for feminist artists. In their fusion of machine and organism, Mutu’s characters are visual metaphors for feminist cyborgs, particularly those outlined by Donna Haraway. In this paper, I examine parallels between collage as an aesthetic strategy and the figure of the cyborg to suggest meaningful ways of approaching differences between women and how they experience life in contemporary Western culture.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.57709/1234428
Recommended Citation
Smith, Nicole R., "Wangechi Mutu: Feminist Collage and the Cyborg." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2009.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/1234428