Sentinel IV, 2020, is one of the latest of the artist’s Sentinels, examples of which were featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. These stand as harbingers of the acute imperative to improve our relationship with each other and our planet or to accept that environmental destruction will inevitably decide our fate for us. In these works, Mutu radicalises clichéd associations of nature as an eternally forgiving female-mother, and expresses a deep sense of humankind’s complex, equal and non-negotiable coexistence with one another and all organisms. Writing about Mutu’s Sentinels in the Financial Times, Ariella Budick comments, ‘Mother Nature has always been seen as capricious, exploding with volcanic rage even as she nurses seedlings into food. The genius of Mutu’s approach lies precisely in the flow of metaphor, the tension between meanings.’

In 2019, Wangechi Mutu was featured in the Whitney Biennial, and was commissioned to create sculptures for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Fifth Avenue façade niches – the first-ever such installation on Met Museum’s historic exterior – inaugurating a new annual series. TIME recently named the artist one of its ‘28 Outstanding Women’.