Explore new ways of knowing with Wangechi Mutu’s “My Cave Call”

The St. Louis Art Museum is kicking off its exciting slate of 2024 featured works and exhibitions this week with “My Cave Call” from Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu. The video work will be on view in Gallery 301, which highlights New Media, from January 12 to March 31. To learn more about “My Cave Call,” Mutu’s body of work, and why exposing St. Louis audiences to this film felt so important, we sat down to chat with Charlie Farrell, the 2022-2024 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow responsible for bringing the work to SLAM. 

Can you tell us about Wangechi Mutu’s “My Cave Call” and its wider themes?

The film is a parable on knowledge-seeking that grounds non-Western, specifically Kenyan, ways of knowing. It’s a really meditative experience. It starts off with a child narrating about histories that have been lost and then sort of shifts into a cave where Mutu transforms into this horn-armed creature as the cave fills with smoke. And for me, it’s a way to think about what it means to reclaim lost histories and connect with humanities that have been, not just underserved, but really underprivileged in how we investigate our own personal histories. What I found most intriguing about the film is how grounded it is and Kenyan ways of knowing specifically. It takes place at Mount Suswa, which is a Kenyan holy site, but specifically important to Maasai people, who are indigenous to Kenya. 

What drew you to Mutu’s work to begin with?

Wangechi Mutu’s work is multifaceted and includes prints, collages, sculptures, and films. As she has been making work for the past 25 years. Her fantastical works invite viewers into a well-established world. I feel most people are more familiar with her prints and her sculptures. With her print work, she’s investigating these humanoid forms, a real converging of East and West, epistemologies, relationships between beauty and the grotesque and what that might look like. This film in particular really speaks to her body of work at large and is really not interested in being very easily understood. The horn-armed person Mutu transforms into in “My Cave Call” is featured in some of her other works as well. It takes a few viewings to really sit with and digest the film, and I think everyone will come away with something different. I certainly still feel very emotional after every time I watch the film, and I’ve seen it more than once.

What makes “My Cave Call” such a good fit for the New Media collection at SLAM? 

With New Media, which is our Gallery 301 on the third level, I feel it’s a space to really investigate video art as a legitimate expression of visual culture, not just with paintings and sculptures, and really show the best of film practices. With [our] renewed interest in showing new, emerging, and exciting films of artists of color, I think that Wangechi Mutu, especially at this point in her career, makes a lot of sense because the Saint Louis Art Museum collects, presents, interprets, and conserves works of art of the highest quality across time and cultures. And I think “My Cave Call” is an example of excellence that the museum certainly is interested in, so I think it fits into the broader mission of what the museum is trying to accomplish.

What do you hope folks who come to see “My Cave Call” take away from it?

For a visitor who’s not really familiar with contemporary African art, I would hope that this would inspire them to continue to dive deep and engage with artists from this area of the world, and I’d hope to break down the constructs of what people may think African art has to look like, what African artists have to do, and what African artists have to produce. I hope that visitors would also be able to engage with their own spiritual practices. If there are ways that visitors have been neglectful of their own personal histories or spiritual practices or just connecting with the earth in general, I would hope that this would inspire some further reflection for some visitors.

What excites you most about bringing this film to Saint Louis audiences?

As an early-career curator, I’m really interested in contemporary art of the African diaspora. And so it was a really exciting opportunity to work with one of the emerging voices in contemporary African art and bring that to Saint Louis. Saint Louis is in the Midwest, but I think personally, for me, you shouldn’t have to go to the northeast or New York or Miami to see really exciting artwork. That work can exist in the Midwest. That work can exist in Saint Louis, and as someone who’s early in her career, I’m really excited to continue to cultivate that legacy of excellence in Saint Louis…I think the beauty of art is that it pushes you to engage with others and engage with yourself in a really wonderful way. So, come see things that you’re familiar with that you like, but also come see things that you may not be as familiar with. 

To learn more about Wangechi Mutu’s “My Cave Call,” visit slam.org.