Wangechi Mutu – Poems of the Black Earth

The Kenyan-American artist brings to the Galleria Borghese an exhibition that reinterprets the museum through suspended forms, radical spatial gestures and new mythologies. An exhibition that expands from the museum’s interior rooms to the facade and Secret Gardens, with an intervention in the spaces of the American Academy in Rome

From June 10 to September 14, 2025, the Galleria Borghese will host, for the first time in Cardinal Scipione’s residence, an exhibition by Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu, entitled Poems of the Black Earth, curated by Cloé Perrone. The project, which also moves, like the recently concluded exhibition on the Baroque poet Giovan Battista Marino, from the museum’s interest in poetry, is conceived as a site-specific intervention that unfolds in the museum’s interior rooms, on the façade and in the Secret Gardens, challenges the classical tradition by traversing suspensions, fragmented forms and new imagined mythologies, and creates a multilayered dialogue between the artist’s contemporary language and ancient authority.