By Victoria L. Valentine

"When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History" is on view at the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas, from April 7, 2024 - April 13, 2025.

By Stephanie Sporn

For centuries, painters have taken creative liberties when depicting their sitters’ attire, whether for sheer visual impact or to imbue their works with symbolic significance. This phenomenon, in which the artist doubles as stylist, has been the subject of recent solo shows, including exhibitions on Gilded Age master, John Singer Sargent, and purveyor of contemporary cool, Barkley L. Hendricks. Today, a new generation of sartorially savvy artists are leading the charge, capturing clothing to stunning effect – but rather than merely painting fashion, these women consider style as a means to convey notions of heritage, pride, and power.

The Crocker Museum of Art has announced acquisition of “Home Sweet Home (After Seurat, Manet and Pippin)” a monumental painting by Chicago-based artist Wangari Mathenge. Born in Kenya in 1973, the artist was inspired by her hometown, staging photos about a mile from where she grew up, bringing the photos back to her studio in Chicago where she painted “Home Sweet Home (After Seurat, Manet and Pippin)” on four canvases, creating one grand composition. The 96-inch-by-290-inch painting was acquired in April 2023 with plans to install the painting in the main museum entrance at Friedman Court. The acquisition was made possible with the support of Simon K. Chiu in honor of the Crocker’s staff, docents, volunteers, and supporters. The acquisition of this work will help the Crocker Museum expand its collection of BIPOC artists.

Explore the complexities of visibility in our latest exhibition, When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History. The exhibition aims to broaden and complicate official histories and their corresponding visual strategies to allow for richer representations of those who have been traditionally excluded or erased. When You See Me features nearly 60 works by a diverse, intergenerational group of 50 artists who contend with visibility both socially and formally. Their works explore invisibility, hypervisibility, the desire to be seen, and the right to be private.

In a painting from the series A Day of Rest, the London and Chicago based painter Wangari Mathenge depicts three women sitting by the fireplace in her studio in Kenya. The A Day of Rest series portrays 20 women the artist found through an organisation that trains and empowers domestic workers. The first paintings in the series were created in 2023. Wangari will be painting further works this year. 

Featuring more than 100 works drawn primarily from the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition spans more than two centuries and includes nineteenth-century studio photography; portraits from the Harlem Renaissance; images from the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Lives Matter eras; pictures of Black celebrities and political figures; and artists’ self-portraits.

By Melissa Smith

It wasn’t that long ago that Wangari Mathenge was a practicing attorney. When she quit her job and started considering what to do next, two choices presented themselves: she could either join the family business in Kenya, or finally take her painting “seriously.” The latter, to Mathenge, meant pursuing art as a full-blown career. In 2019, Mathenge enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, completing her MFA in 2021.

Following its debut at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2021, the group exhibition Black American Portraits travels to Atlanta’s Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. Co-curated by Spelman College Museum of Fine Art’s Executive Director Liz Andrews and Tate’s Britton Family Curator-at-Large Christine Y. Kim (both formerly of LACMA), the exhibition reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters and spaces – this time placing Black women portrait artists center stage. 

A sumptuous survey of over 300 women painters and their work spanning almost five centuries.

Great Women Painters is a groundbreaking book that reveals a richer and more varied telling of the story of painting. Featuring more than 300 artists from around the world, it includes both well-known women painters from history and today's most exciting rising stars.

Zeitz MOCAA presents an exhibition that explores Black self-representation through portraiture and figuration in painting. Titled When We See Us, this timely exhibition celebrates global Black subjectivities and Black consciousness from pan-African and pan-diasporic perspectives.

Elephant features an in depth article on painter Wangari Mathenge by essayist Alejandro Oliva. "For Mathenge, the authenticity of her subjects, the interiors they populate, is more about making a mark in the historical record: this is what it looks like to be a Black Kenyan woman, or a Black Kenyan family, living in a home in Chicago or London or Kenya.”

Stretching the Body brings together a group of thirteen women artists from different generations and geographical origins, who through the medium of painting reflect on the genre of portraiture and the theme of the human figure. The exhibition title is a play on words in the English language, referencing the classic action of stretching the canvas and the physical exercise of stretching in order to highlight the space of painting as a physical and conceptual perimeter within which to explore new notions of corporeality.

Featuring Wangari Mathenge, Otis Kwame Kye Quiacoe, Betye Saar and Kehinde Wiley.

To complement the presentation of The Obama Portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald on tour from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), LACMA presents Black American Portraits. Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this exhibition reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces.

UN Women, the agency of the United Nations dedicated to gender equality and women’s empowerment, will host the first all-Black, all-women global selling exhibition and auction titled “A Force for Change”, with proceeds benefiting Black women across the world and the participating artists. The exhibition includes 26 works by prominent and emerging female artists of African descent to recognize and elevate awareness of the transformative power of Black women’s art in social justice movements, and to support UN Women’s nascent global Black Women’s Programme. Works by artists Cinthia Sifa Mulanga, Tschabalala Self, Sungi Mlengeya, Wangari Mathenge, Zanele Muholi, and Selly Rabe Kane are included, among many others. 

African-born, Chicago-based artist Wangari Mathenge presents a collection of new drawings. Mathenge paints small groups of individuals in conversational sittings viewed from interesting perspectives, which provides insight into both the subject and circumstance. This intimate series of works on paper sees her father at times in familial settings – reading, draped across chairs or posing with a child.

By Megan O'Grady for The New York Times T Magazine

“The Ascendants XI (Homage to Ecclesiastes Three, One Through Eight)” (2021), made exclusively for T by the Chicago-based artist Wangari Mathenge, who said: “As part of the diaspora, I’m interested in what can ease the sense of displacement. The figures here might long to step out into a different kind of world, but for now they sit in comfortable silence in a shared space they’ve created for themselves. Who are the people you feel safe with? Maybe you take them for granted, but they are actually really important.”

By Enuma Okoro for Financial Times

This past week we hit 11C in New York. It’s not exactly spring yet, but after what feels like an incredibly long winter, the slight rise in temperature was enough to get me scouring the internet for exhibitions welcoming masked visitors. I’ve been so cautious and homebound the past few months, and I’ve missed venturing out to see art in real life, up close and personal.

Critical Resistance seeks to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. We believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure. As such, our work is part of global struggles against inequality and powerlessness. The success of the movement requires that it reflect communities most affected by the PIC. Because we seek to abolish the PIC, we cannot support any work that extends its life or scope.

Museum of the African Diaspora + Artsy are thrilled to present MoAD: Diaspora Unite! Artists of African Descent Benefit Auction 2020 featuring works from some of the more important artists of African descent around the globe. In creating an expansive, yet focused auction representing the infinite iterations of the African diaspora, MoAD brings together artists who have close ties to the museum in support of their mission as they continue the significant work done by the museum over the last 15 years since they’ve opened their doors to the public. This auction will provide critical funding to account for the loss of revenues due to COVID-19 as MoAD makes every effort to open their doors once again.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce representation of Wangari Mathenge, a historically-focused painter who reinterprets traditional African patriarchal society alongside her own. Juxtaposing modern and contemporary references, Mathenge's work is dedicated to the investigation and incorporation of a visual testimony of the oft-discounted black female experience within the context of both customary African society and the Diaspora. Shifting the dialogue around painting and identity, the artist's portraits highlight these silent exchanges and hierarchical dynamics. Often depicting people with whom she has significant relationships, her paintings are realized through structured compositions emboldened with gestural strokes and mark making.

By Isis Davis-Marks for Artsy

Wangari Mathenge’s paintings often show people caught in a particular moment. Maybe they’re drinking a cup of coffee, like the woman in Coffee At Cassell’s (2019), or gazing wistfully at something beyond the frame, as in The Cacophony of Silence (2019). Some of her figures are based on herself or pictures of family members.

“I’ve heard comments about how empowering and inspiring it is for black people to see themselves reflected this way,” Mathenge said. “However, for me, painting is merely an expression of myself, a form of catharsis. Currently, it takes the form of figurative painting, but if it ever morphed into abstraction, it would still feel the same to me—something of me that I offer to the world unsolicited.”