Wangechi Mutu: I was introduced to Priscilla by Juan Roselione-Valadez, the director of the Rubell Museum in Miami and a former classmate of mine at Cooper Union — friends and old teachers often get in touch when there’s someone interesting who wants to meet me. A few years later, I had a show in Miami, where Priscilla’s from, and we met up and walked around the botanical garden in Coral Gables. It has all these incredible plants from equatorial places including Kenya. Growing up in Nairobi, I developed a real sense of how nature thrives and survives around us, and my work is in part about looking for nature’s healing qualities, which can teach us things in a language all their own. That’s something I felt Priscilla understood. We’re coming out of the same river, in a way.
She’ll send me images of work in progress or of things she’s curious about, and she came to help with the install of my current museum show [“Intertwined,” through June 4] at the New Museum in New York. Her own work is always colorful, mystical and unusual in a beautiful way. I just encourage her to keep going. I think art is a tool that allows people to process what humanity is going through. To me it’s very much an old medicine — looking at all the work for my show makes me hopeful because I know it’ll be here beyond my lifetime and will speak on my behalf.
Priscilla Aleman: I went to an arts magnet high school, and one day in sculpture class, I overheard the teacher talking about Wangechi’s work to another student. When I saw images of her collages, I felt as though I’d walked through a portal. It was a whole new way of seeing a figure.
The first time I met Wangechi, I was nervous, but then she invited me to sit on her back porch in Brooklyn with her and just watch the butterflies. Even after I became her studio assistant in 2010, I was struck by how she cultivated not just her art but a sense of balance and well-being. She’s an awesome mom and grows plants in her studio, and there’s Häagen-Dazs in the fridge. That all taught me that you don’t have to be this struggling artist, bitter and hacking away.
After I got my B.F.A. [from Cooper Union in New York], I felt wrung dry. I wanted to fall in love with creating again, and I turned to archaeology, working in archives and on excavation sites in Miami. There’s something freeing about going into the field and allowing yourself to be led. I felt, too, that the artifacts connected me to the human while highlighting the absence of the body, and that’s how I made my way back to sculpture. Right now, I feel a deep kinship with the ocean. It’s funny how my investigations sometimes parallel Wangechi’s. I’ll say, “Oh, you’re working with mermaids? Me, too.”
Interviews have been edited and condensed.
