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Wangechi Mutu: Feminist Collage and the Cyborg

Smith, Nicole R.
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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.

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Date
2009-12-01
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Research Projects
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Keywords
Wangechi Mutu, Collage, Feminist art, Cyborg, Donna Haraway, Western art, Postmodern art, Postcolonial art, Contemporary art, Machine, Organism, Kenya, Female persona, Assemblage, Photomontage, Constructed identity
Citation
Smith, Nicole R.. "Wangechi Mutu: Feminist Collage and the Cyborg." 2009. Thesis, Georgia State University. https://doi.org/10.57709/1234428
Embargo Lift Date
2010-03-19
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