Internationally renowned Artist and Activist Wangechi Mutu held a public artist lecture sponsored Montserrat College of Art Gallery on Thursday, May 14 at The Cabot Theatre in Beverly. Mutu is a Kenyan-born, New York-based who has been called the most influential African artist today. 
Mutu was also the keynote commencement speaker and honorary doctoral recipient at Montserrat College of Art’s graduation ceremonies the following day on May 15.See Mutu’s work at wangechimutu.com.
Mutu is the recipient of the United States Artist Grant (2014), the Brooklyn Museum’s Artist of the Year Award (2013), and was honored as Deutsche Bank’s first Artist of the Year (2010). She received an MFA from Yale and BFA from Cooper Union.She had just returned to the US from her appearance at the Venice Biennale before giving her talk at Montserrat.
Artist Biography
Mutu earned a BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Science in 1996, and then received an MFA from Yale University in 2000. She is the recipient of the United States Artist Grant (2014), the Brooklyn Museum’s Artist of the Year Award (2013), and was honored as Deutsche Bank’s first Artist of the Year (2010). She has exhibited at major institutions including recent one-person shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Staatlichen Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Wiels Contemporary Art Center, Brussels; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina; the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Illinois; and Miami Art Museum. Mutu recently participated in the Dak’Art Biennial, the Kochi-Muziris Biennial, the Paris Triennial: Intense Proximity, the International Center of Photography’s Triennial and the Moscow Bienniale. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art; the Brooklyn Museum; and Tate Modern in London. See Mutu’s work at wangechimutu.com.
