Wangechi Mutu is one of the FT’s Women in 2019: the game changers

As her new works stand watch over the Met, the Kenyan-American sculptor talks about reshaping art history. By Annalisa Quinn

In niches in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, four otherworldly yet familiar figures sit. Regal women, 7ft tall with elongated heads and tapering fingers, they seem like cosmic visitors here to pass judgment on a lesser species.

The work, “The NewOnes, will free Us”, fills spaces on the facade of the Met that have sat empty since the building was completed in 1902. “I wanted them to sit upright and still and unencumbered. And unafraid,” says Wangechi Mutu, the Kenyan-American sculptor who made them.

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Image: Portrait of Wangechi Mutu, 2019

Photography:  © Miranda Barnes