Across forms, Solange advances a creative unity. The Houston-born artist began her solo musical career in 2002, followed by projects across fashion, music, and cinema. Upon releasing her critically acclaimed 2016 album A Seat at the Table, she shot to the forefront of the sonic conversation. With lush, incisive tracks like “Cranes in the Sky” and “Don’t Touch My Hair,” she crystallized a personal yet political depiction of her Black experience. Her 2019 follow-up, When I Get Home, explored her Texas roots while sprawling out across visual media: In the “Almeda” music video, dancers in black suits and white leggings traverse a five-by-four grid of DMC DeLoreans, opening their butterfly doors in perfect synchronicity, as if they’re waving hello to the future. Perhaps this unanimity of dancers presaged her celebrated score for Play Time, a ballet choreographed by Gianna Reisen and performed in 2022. As of late, she’s been sculpting in glass. Befitting an artist with such a wide-ranging creative practice, Solange founded Saint Heron in 2013. The creative agency uses objects (including a collaboration with the MoMA Design Store), exhibitions, videos, and more to engage with and center Black artists of the past, present, and future.

Wangechi Mutu’s work also transcends singular media. The artist, who splits her time between studios in her longtime home of New York and her native Nairobi, has worked in and beyond collage, bronze, painting, and video installation. While her most widely known works today may be her mermaid-like sculptures inspired by Kenyan folktales, she’s crafted at all scales: She’s cast massive bronze sculptures and made multi-channel video works like The End of Carrying All (2015), projected across a gallery expanse. She’s painted and collaged uncanny figures on mylar surfaces that span from above human height to the size of tabloid paper. Many of her red-dirt sculptures—which blend paper pulp, cow horns, and glass beads—have depths of around a foot, giving them the aura of a mystical device or archaeological remnant. This blending of media and typologies is a given for Mutu, who once said she aims to conceptually disrupt binaries like “African/European, archaic/modern, religion/pornography.” Fantasy destabilizes reality; myth questions truth; the human, mechanical, and animal merge. As described by the New Museum for a major 2023 retrospective: “At once culturally specific and transnational in scope, Mutu’s work grapples with contemporary realities, while proffering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis.” Mutu is an artist who can hold conflicting ideas in tension without reconciliation, encouraging a clear-sighted yet complex viewership.

For Document, the pair are joined by MoMA curator of media and performance Thomas (T.) Jean Lax as they discuss water as history, material play, surrender, and the force of the imagination.

Solange was photographed by Joshua Woods at the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. Built in 1949 by the architect Philip Johnson as his personal home, the Glass House is considered one of the most significant works of American modernism. In addition to the original house, the estate includes 14 other structures added by Johnson through the ’90s. A registered National Historic Landmark, today the Glass House and its grounds are conserved by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

“I’m always brought back to Houston and my time growing up there, and what an incredible vantage point I had growing up in Third Ward.”

Solange wears dress by Tom Ford. Briefs by Fleur du Mal. Shoes by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Earrings by Cartier.

Thomas Lax: What a pleasure it is to be in time together. Where are both of you right now, both literally as in where you are physically, but also what does the place that you’re in represent to you? What is it bringing you in this moment?

Wangechi Mutu: I’ve been traveling quite a bit in the last six months, more than I actually want to. I love to be in one place to work and just connect with the ground and make sure that I’m with my family. But right now, I’m in Nairobi in one of my home studio spaces. As much as I’m in Nairobi, I’m also in a place in my mind right now where I can dive into the work. My work grounds me. My kids do too—but in a funny way, because they pull and push me so much. But my work is my rock.

Thomas: And Solange, where are we finding you, both literally and metaphorically?

Solange: I am literally sitting on my bed, and I’m looking out to the trees and the sun and feeling really grateful to begin a week immersed in nature. I live in the woods right by the river, so this is a really special conversation because Wangechi and I are both Cancers, and when she talks about her work grounding her and being a rock, I feel a lot of grounding being by the water. I don’t know if, Wangechi, the water has a significant grounding effect on you and your life. I know a lot of Cancers feel an affinity for the motion of the water, and I am sort of in a space now where I set out to enter into new planes.

This Thursday kicks off the Saint Heron Eldorado Ballroom series in Los Angeles at Walt Disney Hall. There’s a lot of care and tenderness that we are wanting to bring to the program. It’s a really special time, a time of transition, but also a time of grounding, nature and hiking and waterfalls and all of these things have been holding me really close lately. I’m finding some balance in life, which is always very necessary when you are creating new things.

Thomas: I’m also a water sign. I’m a Pisces and can very much relate to that sense of flow. Solange, one place where your work shares resonance with Wangechi’s is the role of the past in the present and the future. For me, the water, in the way that so many Black poets and artists and thinkers have considered it, is a cosmology where so much that has come before can be re-imagined and reused in the construction of what might come next.

I’ll ask you, Solange, to start thinking about what this Thursday means. Obviously, the Eldorado Ballroom is such a historic site in Houston for dancing and celebration. How is it translating and transmitting out to Los Angeles? What are some of these paths that you’re not just elevating but remixing, giving new life to, bringing new collaborators into?

Solange: I’ve always been on a quest to answer these questions about myself, and I think with each year they become more specific. So as I’m asking myself, ‘How did I get this way? Why do I make the choices I make? Why do the things that make me tick tick, and where did that come from?’ I’m always brought back to Houston and my time growing up there, and what an incredible vantage point I had growing up in Third Ward—being able to say that I come from not only the same neighborhood as Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen but also the great poet Pat Parker, and [understanding] what it means to come from a space where Black women have been innovating, experimenting, and reimagining the conversation of what it means to be us. All of that was second nature to me. As I think about Eldorado Ballroom and how radical it was for a Black couple, Anna and Clarence Dupree, to start this in 1939 and create a space where performance could really thrive, I’m feeling the ghosts of Mary Lou Williams and Julia Perry, two composers who have completely changed the trajectory of what I know is possible. I’m really, really excited to celebrate their spirit in this temple.

When you asked me about the past, present, future, I think about a conversation that I had with Wangechi. And y’all are going to be so tired of how much I’m mentioning Cancers, but I really am in a season of understanding myself better. The thing about astrology is, whether you believe it or not, there definitely are patterns that align. You have a choice if you want to speak to those patterns, live up to them, or if you want to be aware of the not-so-positive ones and say, ‘How can I evolve past some of these things that might be innately set in the path for me?’ I was just in conversation with a friend of mine about Octavia Butler, and thinking about Wangechi’s work I was like, ‘You know, the Cancer spirit is one of a futurist.’

Left: Dress (worn as top) by Gucci. Briefs by Fleur du Mal. Tights by Calzedonia. Shoes by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Earrings and bracelet by Cartier. Right: Dress and shoes by Ferragamo.

Thomas: Even as it’s of the future, it feels, in the way you describe it, so imminent to the here and now. I’m curious, Wangechi, what your return to Nairobi has brought in terms of your artistic practice, and also your activist practice. Are there figures from your own past or from an artistic past that you’ve claimed who have had any particular effects over these last years as you’ve made a home and studio back in Kenya?

Wangechi: There’s a lot of resonance and a familiarity with things that have to do with water. I’m obsessed with water in a very peculiar manner, because I’m a highland girl—my people are from the hills of Nyeri, where it is quite cold. I’m always shocked when people say, ‘It must be so hot there.’ and I’m like, ‘No, it’s actually cool where I’m from.’ The reason that water is such a powerful medium for me is because of the very surprising effect that it’s had throughout my life. One of the most prominent times that water showed up was when I realized I was a really good swimmer; swimming opened up a valve in the veins of my creativity that being on the earth, being on the ground, being on soil, being on solid land, hadn’t.

The beauty about leaving home—and I’ll say ‘home’ in many different iterations—at the age of 17, was that I immersed myself into different kinds of water. I loved being by and in the ocean, and that’s how I finally understood my birth sign had a relationship to water. I discovered through discussions with a Cancer girlfriend that water spoke of deep sadness and transformation, danger and birth, baptism and gestation, and that’s how I felt as an immigrant in those formative years of my art practice and in those early years in my life in New York. I felt like I was in constant flux between things that made me feel stable and things that completely unmoored me.

Watercolor, water making, water immersion, is returning to the deep, deep mind of god, and the deep mind of creation, and the deep mind of the woman, the female medium. So to meet other women who are not only creatives, but also understand the danger and the spark and the fire in water, the fact that water isn’t just a medium that cleanses and washes, that it is something that has brutalized people and killed people and buried people, I think it comes from something much, much deeper and older.

Thomas: Wangechi, every day, when I come to work at MoMA, I have your bronze sculpture, MamaRay [2020], that greets me, and there’s something about the way you describe the perpetual coming and going that feels so materialized in that work. It’s this sea creature, an assemblage of time periods, that seems to have just arrived from the water onto the land.

I want to ask both of you about materials within your creative life, which is vast—even to say interdisciplinary is to assume that there are disciplines. I know that for you, Solange, for many years clay and ceramics were critical. What is your personal relationship to clay, for which water is so critical? How has your relationship to materials shifted over time?

Solange: Honestly, over the last couple of years, I have connected more so with glass. Glass has taught me more about myself and taught me really tough lessons that I was trying to learn in so many other ways, which was the act of surrender.

Because I’ve lived such a chaotic life where I often felt like I had no control, control of my body, my story, my narrative—I developed an almost obsessive need for control, and it did not serve me in a lot of ways.

Dress by Phoebe Philo. Earring by Cartier.

And one of those ways—which my last record, When I Get Home, was primarily about—was anytime that I would enter a deeply meditative state, I would get to a place where I’d think, ‘You have a choice to remain in control of your thoughts and your body and your spirit, or you can surrender to this unknown line in the sand that can take you to spaces that you’ve never been to and you don’t really know what they may do to you,’ and I would very consciously exit that state.

When I began to work with glass, I realized that it was the first time in a while that I had to be on the material’s time and space. I had to constantly be moving, I had to constantly be dancing, I had to constantly be surrendering to the material or it would break. This material comes from sand and comes from the earth, but it still appears as transparency, and I was able to see that spirit of transparency reflected in myself and in the things that I wanted to say. Over time, I’ve abandoned all of these other materials that I was working with, because I’ve entered this love affair with what glass can be, what it’s meant to me, what it’s taught me—the fact that it’s both solid and transparent. It reflects so much about the way that I see myself and the way that I want to see myself.

“Glass has taught me more about myself and taught me really tough lessons that I was trying to learn in so many other ways, which was the act of surrender.

Wangechi: I’m so curious as an artist, what’s your activity like with the glass?

Solange: I was taking lessons in Florida, and I did them off and on for a few months, and I made the first shape and form of the glass that evolved into the collection that I’ve made with Saint Heron. And then I searched high and low for a Black glassblower who could further my practice and help me to fabricate on a level that my skill set just was not at. I met Jason McDonald, who is originally from Tacoma, Washington. He was working out of Philadelphia at the time, and he is a Venetian-trained Murano glassblower.

I was really inspired by brutalist architecture and repetition, so I brought a lot of that into the design process. There is one idea of the form of bantu knots, and it’s been really incredibly fun to drink from these objects, knowing where all of this has come from. It’s very ceremonious.

I love that the glasswork becomes a tangible artifact of how I see the world, but also that it elevates a mundane gesture, just even the simplicity of drinking water out of these vessels. Now I’m working on decanters, so I’m scaling up, and I have four sculptures that I have been trying to fabricate.

Thomas: In addition to the kind of intensity of belief that you both have in the fierceness of the imagination, you are both people who are incredibly generous. And it’s through generosity that the two of you met one another, through Wangechi’s work with the organization Africa’s Out!, which is a clear-throated call to other queer folks living today in Kenya, across the continent and its diaspora, to help one another out. In 2020, you invited Solange to collaborate with you at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, both as a creator and as somebody able to leverage our collective social force towards a set of needs. The fundraiser you organized with other artists raised money to benefit UHAI [the East African Sexual Health and Rights Initiative] and to honor the late Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina. Wangechi, tell us a little bit more about what Africa’s Out! has meant to you, and then Solange, how you came into that story and what it meant for you.

Wangechi: I have to say, I don’t know if I’ve even thanked Solange enough for how quickly, beautifully, gracefully, kindly, and sweetly she rose to the occasion.

Solange: I was honored.

Bodysuit and shoes by Phoebe Philo. Tights by Calzedonia. Earrings by Cartier.

Wangechi: It was such a gesture of kindness and trust that you gave to us for what you did. We didn’t know what you were going to do. You didn’t quite know what I was going to do, we just sort of went with it. I remember feeling ‘This is a kindred spirit.’ What I wanted to do was to create a full-on celebration and say, ‘It is so beautiful to be human, to be free, to be loved for who you are, to be able to create and say what it is you’re going through, to be able to articulate your feelings and your power.’ That laws were being created then—and now—that had the power to decide that what makes people special is what they are going to be discriminated against and tortured and imprisoned for, was appalling.

And instead of focusing on that feeling of hopelessness, because that’s how we were all feeling, especially those of us who are looking at the legislation, we decided we’d make everyone want to be part of our party, part of our joy, part of our transformation, part of our creative evening. It was really trying to spin a magic spell. There are a lot of concerns about the way laws are being written around sexuality and gender equality. That was 10 years ago, but it made a massive imprint because it repositioned artists and the LGBTQ African community as a fearless, exuberant, and beautiful space, as opposed to being a tortured, under-the-radar, misunderstood population. Of course there are horror stories, and we know that; that was a reason for doing it. But that’s why I called on Solange, and I was floored at how impactful the Africa’s Out! celebration was. I was very happy. Still am.

Solange: I have so many fond memories of that night and feeling so embraced by you and your ideas and the way that you see the world, but also all of the incredible people that surround you. The continent of Africa has given so much to me, not only as the place of my ancestors, but at one point I was going once a year to a new country on the continent. I went to Rwanda, to Senegal, to Ghana, to South Africa, and I just felt transformed by the spirit and these places and all that it gave to me. And the poetry that came out of that, the songs that came out of that, the ideas and the thoughts, and to be able to rise to that occasion and the space that you created for that night was just so, so special. When I think about that night, I think about the other night when I got to congratulate you on your award [at the Storm King gala].

Wangechi: That was so fun. It was nice to share that with you. When are the decanters out? We need to have a ritual, a libation.

Solange: I would love that. They’ll be out in November and I’ll make sure that I get one to you. They’re very, very heavy.

“How can I evolve past some of these things that might be innately set in the path for me?”

Left: Dress by Phoebe Philo. Right: Bodysuit and shoes by Phoebe Philo. Tights by Calzedonia. Earrings by Cartier.

Thomas: Wangechi, I’m curious in terms of some of the materials that have been in the work in the last seven or so years as I’ve followed it—bronze, wood, red soil—which range in scale but share a pairing or juxtaposing of solidity with a sense of constant flux. As Solange was talking about ‘surrender,’ I was brought back to that last sculpture, Shavasana, in your retrospective, your survey show here in New York at the New Museum, where you climb in this upward spiral. There’s this sculpture of release at the end. What is your relationship to materials, your hope for them, but also their force on you?

Wangechi: It’s such a continuum. I feel like I’ve been going back to the same classroom for years, and every time I feel like I’ve learned enough, I realize no, no, no, I need to understand this even more. My entryway into understanding contemporary art was very much through academia and my education, which ironically was also linked to emancipating myself and saying, ‘You know what? I’m going to do this thing that I was told is the most absurd thing to do. I’m going to come out as an artist.’ With all that freedom I found myself in, I also threw myself into the most unfree place, which is art school. One of the best things about art school is that it does give you a lot of shit, angst, anguish—it gave me a lot to fight and spar against, it gave me real restrictions.

There were clearly things that were considered to be art. Specific histories and specific types of work that we should anticipate making, because that’s what the future is about. We were taught the figure was gone, painting was gone, conceptualism and minimalism in a very specific manner and way of working with material is the way of the future. This was rammed down our throats to the point that I remember by the time I was in my second year in grad school, I just became silent.

But at the same time, I was reading Robert Farris Thompson, I was reading lots of Octavia Butler. I was reading poetry by Senghor. Tons of work I was looking at had so many reflections on histories that understood the prominence of our voices as African and Black people and people who are not European. When I released myself from this school-thinking, the first thing I did was do this thing I didn’t go to school for: I started painting and collaging and cutting things up and putting them together. And not in any way taking into consideration ‘What is appropriate for this moment now? What is art history asking of us?’ And from that I built myself—out of cobbling images and photographs, between watercolor and lots of gluing of fabrics, I came up with this thing that I had never thought I was going to come up with nor was it what I was taught to do. I worked this way wherever I went, wherever I found myself working. In retrospect, Kenya was the place I always hoped I would return to materially, because my material sensibility is from my childhood. I remember the smells, the textures, the crooked trees, the pebbles and rocks everywhere, I remember the color of the sky.

So what I’ve found is when I’m still—and this happens in New York too—when I’m really calm and I really am one with what I’m doing, even if it’s not clear where I’m going, there’s a childish thing that I’m able to do. I remember looking out my studio in Nairobi and going, ‘I see all my supplies are there. They’re all waiting for me.’ And I started to attach and bind and connect and unite them.

Left: Bodysuit, skirt, and shoes by
Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Briefs by Fleur du Mal. Earrings by Cartier. Right: Dress by Schiaparelli. Earrings by Cartier.

Solange: So fun. And I can’t believe we both wore white silk. But of course we both wore white silk.

Wangechi: Of course we did. I think Africa calls you so you need to come. You need to come out to Kenya.

Solange: I really am looking forward to coming out to Kenya. And I know that through the lens of The Great Wangechi, it’s going to be an experience like no other.

I wanted to ask you about your performance work and the piece that you did, Stone Ihiga [2009].

Wangechi: Stone Ihiga was my first public performance. I am petrified of public performances, so I do them. But that was me cutting my teeth with performance art.

I worked with an amazing vocalist and composer named Imani Uzuri. In Kikuyu, my language, ihiga is this heavy object that comes out of nature, but it’s also a name in our family. In this case, I was referring to women who’ve been executed using stones or executed using the most painful, violent methods. And particularly, a cousin of mine who died in a terrible way that I wanted to reflect on. I wanted to create a piece that was a bit of a prayer as well as a chant, an incantation, like a breath that went in and out. A meditation. And also to capture a bit of the horror that I thought must have consumed her to death.

I did it once. I never performed it again. I gave out rocks at the performance because I wanted people to leave with something that was weighty, that was familiar to them, that reminded them of Stone Ihiga. I don’t think I’ll ever do it again. But I was also very… I had just had a baby, so I felt very much in that space too, very touched by how vilified my cousin was until death. So that was Stone Ihiga. I can tell you more about it, but I don’t know if I want to over-describe it. It was powerful. It was a very big lesson for me.

Solange: I’m really curious to find out more. We can continue the conversation.

Wangechi: We will continue with our many conversations.

Dress by Givenchy. Earrings by Cartier. Car 1967 Velocity Classic Ford Mustang.

Hair Jawara at Art Partner using Oribe. Make-up Miguel Ramos. Manicure Pika at See Management using Essie. Photo Assistants Shen Williams-Cohen, John Manuel Gomez. Stylist Assistant Morgan Jimenez. Tailor Carol Ai at Carol Ai Studio Tailors. Hair Assistant Roddie Walters. Production Director Lisa Olsson Hjerpe at CHAPEL Productions. On Set Production Marco Pasos. Production Assistants Erik Morales, Zora Schiltz-Rouse, Jonny Berkowitz. Location The Glass House. Special thanks to Diane “Shabazz” Varnie, Ruth Thao, Eve-Marie Kuijstermans-Grillo and Cole Akers.