Crushes make the world go round. They get you up in the morning and into the shower on time. You spend an extra minute with the loofa hitting up that azz crack until it shines. You wash behind your ears and brush your teeth extra careful. But what about a crush where the possibility of you seeing that person in person is somewhere in between zero and… negative zero?!?
In all honesty, those are my favorite crushes because I am never let down by my fantasy. The person that I am digging remains pristine and unflawed. Forever perfect. I am having a crush right now on an artist chick from Kenya (didn’t I tell y’all it was all about Kenyan broads this summer?!?). She was featured on my cousin Glamazon’s site just a few days ago. After I did the knowledge I realized that she was the chick that I have been waiting to meet for 36 years. She has this wicked playful sense of humor and she is smart as all get out. Her name is WANGECHI MUTU and you need to back the fuck up.
WANGECHI was trained as a sculptor and schooled for anthropology, but her heart brought her to New York City to study fine art at Cooper Union. She graduated from Cooper and went to Yale to secure a Masters of Fine Art. Her work takes a serious and satirical look at the damage that Western idealogy has wrought upon the African continent’s cultural identity. She strikes back at the European image of beauty with her collages that resemble amputations, prosthetics, futuristic transplants and bionic body types in surreal and sometimes hallucinogenic settings.
WANGECHI gets it all in the global sense. She sees that people are regarded much like disposable vessels to be stripped down and exploited and then discarded. WANGECHI searches through the cultural wasteland that has become modern day Africa and pulls the dismembered pieces together to form her own exquisite corpse.
WANGECHI MUTU is the logical evolution of ROMARE BEARDEN. She has taken the art of collage making to a place that it hasn’t occupied. Just like ROMARE used his collages to describe the vibrance and humility of rural and urban Blacks. WANGECHI has crafted a beautiful mosaic of work that at once explains the frailty and the ferociousness of femininity.
I love her mind so much that I may have to introduce myself when I see her in Brooklyn this summer. Then again, I probably won’t because I don’t think I want to ruin this crush I’m having.
