5 Female African Artists You Need to Know

Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and spent her undergraduate career in Wales at Cooper Union, before immigrating to the United States, where she earned her MFA from Yale. Today, she lives and works in New York. From a young age Mutu was exposed to how the Western world oversimplified Kenya to be a nameless part of the larger Africa, made up of Safari and traditional ‘tribes’. She addresses this and other post-colonial issues in her work, her photomontages being most well known. They combine ink, acrylic and sometimes glitter and pearls with images cut from travel magazines, pornography, auto magazines, and advertisements to form new human figures. The final images, such as those of Misguided Little Unforgivable Hierarchies (2005) and The Bride Who Married the Camel (2009), are bright and intense, beautiful but also unnerving. The original images have individual contexts and evoke distinct connotations. When joined by Mutu, though, they come to represent the colonial legacy of how the West perceives the African continent as ‘primitive’ as well as its hypersexual objectification of the African female body. The beauty and weirdness draws the viewer in, while the details—women composed of animal heads, cervix diagrams, motorcycles, and the exposed torsos of a playboy model—challenge and disrupt the Western imagination that exoticizes and objectifies the African culture and body.

Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer was born in Cairo and received her MFA in Painting from Villa Arson EPIAR in 1989. Although Amer describes herself primarily as a painter, her work spans and combines multiple mediums. Most notably, she uses embroidery and gardening, labor that is typically categorized as domestic and feminine and often deemed hobbies rather than art. In fusing the accepted fine art medium of paint with these ‘feminine activities’ along with her often erotic depictions of the female body, Amer challenges the notions of the feminine versus masculine, of desire and love. She questions the societal expectations of the pure, maidenly figure that clash with the objectification and sexualization of the female body. In works such as And the Beast (2004) and Knotty but Nice, she questions the relationship of morality and condemnation of the woman’s body. In And the Beast (2004) Amer depicts the self-sacrificial figure of Bell and other Disney princesses masturbating, using acrylic and embroidery on canvas, which calls for the liberation of figures formerly held up for their moral behavior that’s couched in their love of a man – absent of sexual desire. She makes them more human, giving girls healthier role models.