Rome’s Galleria Borghese, renowned for its classical masterpieces, has opened a new chapter in its dialogue with contemporary art through “Black Soil Poems,” an exhibition by Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu, curated by Cloé Perrone.
Set within the storied halls and Secret Gardens of the villa, the exhibition was an extraordinary intervention — one that reshaped space, story, and material with poetic intensity.
Mutu’s practice, which bridges myth, memory, and material politics, found fertile ground in the Galleria’s historical architecture. Indoors, her sculptures — including Ndege, Suspended Playtime, First Weeping Head, and Second Weeping Head — hovered in space, gently unsettling the classical order. They framed new visual paths across the Baroque interiors, defying gravity and fixed narrative. Her use of materials such as bronze, feathers, soil, and wax softened the museum’s rigidity, offering a visual and tactile counterpoint to marble and gilded stucco.
Outside, in the Secret Gardens and on the façade, her bronze figures — The Seated I, The Seated IV, Nyoka, and Water Woman — engaged directly with the site’s imperial grandeur. Mythological yet rooted in African and diasporic traditions, they presented an alternative pantheon of resilience, femininity, and spiritual presence. The exhibition also featured video works like The End of eating Everything, which expanded Mutu’s sculptural vocabulary into the temporal realm.
Sound and language echoed throughout, whether in visual inscriptions or implied resonance, particularly in Grains of War, where lyrics from Bob Marley and Haile Selassie’s 1963 UN speech became sculptural forms of memory and resistance.
In a thoughtful extension of the exhibition, Mutu’s Shavasana I was installed at the American Academy in Rome, lying in quiet contemplation amid ancient funerary stones — a poetic meditation on rest, death, and the persistence of spirit.
Wangechi Mutu x Fendi Peekaboo
To celebrate Black Soil Poems, Mutu created a one-of-a-kind Wangechi Mutu x Fendi Peekaboo bag. The artwork-turned-accessory reflects the artist’s dual gaze: mythic and material. The bag’s outer body is hand-decorated with textured paintwork and gold leaf, depicting two landscapes deeply significant to her — Kenya’s Ngong Hills and Mount Kenya.
Inside, a sculptural composition of wood branches emerges, evoking ancestral symbolism and natural transformation. Like Mutu’s sculptures, the Peekaboo becomes a vessel of story, fluid, layered, and quietly radical.
Here, fashion meets fine art not in collaboration but in communion, as Fendi continues its tradition of inviting visionary artists to challenge form and function through its most iconic silhouettes.
