At nearly 7 feet tall, “The Seated IV” first graced the聽Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade in September 2019 as part of a commission titled . Four “Seated” sculptures by Wangechi Mutu were the first works to take up the positions on The Met’s facade since it was completed in 1902.
On Monday, Jan. 25, one of the four storied bronze sculptures was installed at the north side of the new Hans Rosling Center for Population Health at the corner of W Stevens Way and 15th Ave NE.
“Wangechi Mutu鈥檚 The Seated IV is an extraordinary addition to the UW art collection, and more importantly, to the campus experience,” said聽Shamim Momin,聽Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Henry Art Gallery. “The majestic, powerful, female figure seated in strength and presence may reference the traditional caryatid form, but the artist has removed her from the onus of ‘carrying the weight,’ as she says, speaking to the literal holding up of the architectural structure that caryatids typically enacted, as well as the metaphorical responsibilities of women.
“She is here seated, her pose and aesthetic modeling synthesizes African sculptural traditions with Western approaches, creating a new figure 鈥� holding the historical gravitas in her form, but in command of and not subject to it. The circular mirrored form atop her forehead offers a kind of ‘third eye,’ reflecting our gazes back at one another, or perhaps offering a portal to a new way of seeing. I鈥檝e passed her only twice now as I walked on campus, and she is already an inspiration, a comfort, a presence felt.鈥�
Watch the installation:
The university will invest approximately $1.1 million in artwork for the building, roughly split at about $85,000 from public funds and the remainder from private donors.
About the artist:
Wangechi Mutu is an artist based in New York and Nairobi whose collage-painting,聽sculpture, film, and performances often use composite female forms to explore gender, race, and art history.
Journalists: Download B-roll of the installation .
The Seated IV (2019) is one of four free-standing seated female bronze sculptures (The Seated I, II, III, and IV) commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) to fill the niches of its fa莽ade. Included in the 2019 – 2020 exhibition The New Ones, will free Us, this regal figure, references different aesthetic traditions, resembling a futuristic sage, inspired by caryatids from classical African and European traditions. She is positioned as a dignified leader, free from responsibility of supporting the weight of history or even the world. When developing the work, Mutu used past drawings from her sketchbooks and also studied the African and Oceanic collections in the Met. She was interested in female caryatids, a Congolese 鈥渞oyal stool鈥� made with a kneeling female figure who symbolically carried the King, as well as a Yoruba stool that featured a standing woman whose head supported a man on horseback.
Artist statement about聽The Seated series as told to The Met:
Caryatids, throughout history, have carried these buildings to express the might and the wealth of a particular place. In Greek architecture, you see these women in their beautiful robes, and then in African sculpture across the continent you see these women either kneeling or sitting, sometimes holding a child, as well as holding up the seat of the king. It felt like this was a very ubiquitous position for women across many, many histories. How do I use this figure to change this conversation and this issue?
I wanted to keep the DNA of the woman in an active pose, but I didn鈥檛 want her to carry the weight of something or someone else. The process of taking it from drawing into 3D has been quite epic. Once these molds had been produced in a much larger scale, I really worked hard to individualize everything that really expresses humanity to us. After they had been cast in bronze, I went in to work on the patinas. And that鈥檚 when I was going to have to go in and paint them in fire and really make them alive. . . .
I wanted these things to be about how form and material actually impacts us. I created these coils that I鈥檝e put all the way around their bodies that felt tactile and living and fleshy, but at the same time really protected the women and gave them kind of a privacy and a regal nature. They became almost like soldiers, like they were in armor. And the circular form actually comes from traditional African adornment: Ethiopian, Sudanese tribes that have these incredible lip plates. They鈥檙e mostly worn by women of status. I鈥檝e turned them into mirrors. They鈥檙e able to take light and twist it around; they鈥檙e able to flash at you from a distance.
Women鈥檚 bodies are always at the front of so much of the expression, the hostility, the magnificence of how humankind sees itself. I think of these women as characters that have the capacity, the freedom, and the opportunity to be where they need to be, to say what they have to say. They鈥檙e here, and they鈥檙e present, and they鈥檝e arrived.
Wangechi Mutu discusses making and meaning of The Seated sculptures:聽