Wangechi Mutu Exhibition Opening At New Orleans Museum Of Art

Anyone overdoing it on hurricanes, beignets and revelry along Bourbon Street for Mardis Gras February 13, 2024, can find a cultural detox at the New Orleans Museum of Art. A pair of special exhibitions, one celebrating a local artist whose photography has taken her around the world, the other an international contemporary art superstar with increasing connections to NOLA, intoxicate the mind and feed the soul.

Debbie Fleming Caffery

Debbie Fleming Caffery (b. 1948) is a Louisiana native. For 50 years, Caffery’s black-and-white prints have examined themes of faith, the dignity of labor, and the environment. Her first major retrospective, “Debbie Fleming Caffery: In Light of Everything,” includes examples representative of her entire career from the back breaking work taking place in Louisiana’s sugar cane fields to striking avian portraits taken around the world.

“One of the most notable aspects of Caffery’s photography is the way it transcends traditional genres and categories that we historically use to describe photographs,” Brian Piper, New Orleans Museum of Art’s Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings, told Forbes.com. “While much of her work starts from a place of pure documentary photography, Caffery draws on visual elements that we often associate with other ways of making a picture, using high contrast or very dramatic lighting that we might associate with surrealism or blurred movement that can lend her photographs an abstract quality. The results are photographs that can be very theatrical, but are ultimately grounded in people’s very real-life experiences.”

“In Light of Everything” has been installed in multiple galleries throughout the museum, including in the Great Hall where visitors will encounter her large, haunting photographs of birds.

“Inspired by her memories of raising birds with her grandfather (Guinea hens, chickens), Caffery first began photographing birds during her time in Mexico,” Piper explains of the artist’s most recent work. “She continued making photographs of birds in rescue and rehabilitation facilities in New Mexico and Louisiana, and in captivity in France.”

Also on view are shots from Caffery’s most focused series, at-home portraits of her friend and muse Polly Joseph. The two met in the early 1980s. Joseph lived on the River Road along the levee outside Baton Rouge.

“For the rest of the decade, Caffery visited with Joseph regularly at her home. The two women would speak about their lives, and with Joseph’s participation, Caffery photographed her and her belongings,” Piper said. “These images are a record of the difficult living conditions many African Americans still faced in the 1980s in rural Louisiana, but also a tender representation of the care that Polly Joseph took in her everyday life.

Caffery stayed in touch after Joseph moved into a nursing home in 1989; she passed in 1994.

Caffery’s depictions of rural areas and people around the Gulf South and Southwest Louisiana where she was born, raised, and continues living highlight the exhibition.

“Another part of what makes Caffery’s work distinctive is the length of time that she has been living and photographing the same people and places in her home state. Decades spent befriending people and watching the rhythms of everyday life have allowed Caffery to sharpen her eye for nuance, noticing intimate rituals of work, play, and worship. Sometimes out of those moments she can also coax great drama,” Piper explained. “Traditionally, when we think of documentary photography, it can be akin to photojournalism where we expect a photographer to drop in looking for the highly narrative, front-page image. Caffery’s photography, for all of its drama, has a quietude or contemplation that I think is due to her greater understanding of her home state.”

“In Light of Everything” can be seen through May 5, 2024.

Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu’s (b. 1972; Nairobi, Kenya) relationship with the New Orleans Museum of Art began in 2021 when her iconic, feminine, coiled, bronze The Seated III (2019) joined the collection of NOMA’s fabulous Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden outside the museum. The piece was one of four originally created for display in niches on the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The relationship continues beginning on January 31^st and running through July 14^th, 2024, with “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” a major solo exhibition bringing together nearly one hundred sculptures (on view both inside and out), paintings, collages, drawings, and films presenting the breadth of Mutu’s multidisciplinary practice from the mid-1990s to today. The most complete survey of Mutu’s work to date, “Intertwined” traces connections between recent developments in the artist’s sculptures and her decades-long exploration of the legacies of colonialism, globalization, and African and diasporic cultural traditions.

While Mutu has become celebrated the world over for her monumental sculptural figures–her “sentinels”–this presentation critically features some of her earliest collages and works on paper. These are what first garnered her acclaim in the early 2000s and invitation to the star-making Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artist-in-Residence program in 2003-04.

Throughout Mutu’s practice, her prevalent interest in the transformation or hybridization and combination of human and animal forms reveals itself.

“Mutu’s artistic development has been enriched by her early studies in anthropology, leading her to cultivate a practice that consistently challenges the ways in which cultures and histories have traditionally been classified and arranged hierarchically,” Amanda M. Maples, NOMA’s Françoise Billion Richardson Curator of African Art, told Forbes.com, expanding on the exhibition's wall texts written by New Museum curators where the show originated. “Mutu’s work has also been characterized by a sense of permeable boundaries and hybridity, invested in the complex encounters of bodies, sites, and structures. Threads of these narratives can be experienced in all of her works featured in ‘Intertwined,’ including her collages and her sculptures which translate these ideas into hybrid, humanoid, and fantastical characters.”

No more so than in a collage from 2003, Intertwined, which takes inspiration from a “National Geographic” photo of two hunting dogs fighting over a scrap of meat.

“In the work, Mutu created a pair of conjoined creatures with heads of African wild dogs, which were revered in prehistoric Egypt and are respected in several hunter-gatherer societies, particularly those of the San people,” Maples explained. “Mutu juxtaposes the carnivores’ scruff with her twinned figures’ graceful sensuality. Their skin is ambiguously patterned, reading simultaneously as fur, clothing, or scarification. The work plays on clichés of media portrayals of women while also questioning the association between the animal and the notion of ‘primitivism.’ Intertwined reflects themes that are common throughout Mutu’s work, such as hybridity, transmutation, doubling, and the ambiguous power of feminine sexuality.”

All of which can be seen in her spectacular Crocodylus (2020), an otherworldly femme-reptilian hybrid figure signaling Black feminine power and sovereignty. It is a highlight of NOMA’s permanent collection for the sculpture garden, open daily and always free to visit.