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The Family

Four large-scale bronze figural sculptures by Wangechi Mutu, 2019. Installed in the niches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Fifth Avenue façade as a permanent site-specific commission. The figures blend human and non-human forms, drawing on Kikuyu cosmology and feminist body theory. The first permanent artwork added to the Met's façade.

Scholarly Significance

Add Wangechi Mutu's The Family — the Met façade commission — complementing the existing Mutu-The-Seated node.

Notes

  • ·The Family was the first permanent artwork ever added to the Met's neoclassical Fifth Avenue façade, which was designed by Richard Morris Hunt (opened 1902).
  • ·The four figures draw on Kikuyu cosmology and East African oral traditions; they evoke mythological and ancestral female presences without conforming to classical European figural conventions.
  • ·Mutu has described the figures as representing a family of different beings — not necessarily human — gathered in a relational cluster, challenging normative definitions of family and kinship.
  • ·The bronze surface textures vary across the figures; the exterior two face Fifth Avenue and Central Park, while two interior figures in the Great Hall address museum visitors directly.
  • ·The commission was organised through the Met's 'Façade Commission' programme; The Family was preceded by Kara Walker's temporary installation on the facade (2018).
  • ·Critical reception emphasised the work as a decolonising gesture: a Kenyan artist permanently inscribing non-Western, non-white figuration on one of the world's most prominent Euro-American cultural institutions.