FENDI and Galleria Borghese have announced a summer exhibition called “Black Soil Poems by Wangechi Mutu”, marking a significant moment in the Italian museum’s history.
The Kenyan-American artist is the first living female artist to exhibit at the former residence of Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Rome. Curated by Cloé Perrone, the exhibition is set to run until the 14th of September.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Mutu has also collaborated with FENDI to design a unique Wangechi Mutu x FENDI Peekaboo bag.
Featuring Mount Kenya and the Ngong Hills, the bag merges sculpture with fashion, adding another dimension to Mutu’s creative output.
The exhibition reimagines the museum as a dynamic, evolving space. It spans the museum’s interior, façade, and Secret Gardens, and extends to the American Academy in the Italian capital. Mutu’s site-specific interventions challenge the classical tradition through fragmentation, suspension, and the layering of new mythologies.
Inside the galleries, works such as Ndege, Suspended Playtime, First Weeping Head, and Second Weeping Head hover above visitors, creating new visual pathways without obstructing the historic collection. This sense of suspension reflects a shift in perspective and narrative hierarchy, in keeping with the museum’s theme of metamorphosis for its 2026 programme.
Materials such as bronze, wood, feathers, and soil feature prominently. Bronze, typically associated with permanence and power, is reinterpreted as a vessel for ancestral memory and transformation. The intervention invites viewers to explore what is absent as much as what is visible, emphasising the museum not only as a site of memory but also of imagination.
Outdoors, bronze sculptures such as The Seated I and The Seated IV (originally commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019) occupy the façade and gardens. Additional works, including Nyoka, Heads in a Basket, Musa and Water Woman, suggest themes of hybridity and ritual, while the video work The End of Eating Everything introduces movement and sound into the installation.
At the American Academy in Rome, Shavasana I continues the exhibition’s exploration of death and dignity. The bronze figure lies beneath a straw mat, surrounded by Roman funerary inscriptions.
Black Soil Poems is supported by FENDI as part of its ongoing partnership with Galleria Borghese.
