Nontsikelelo Mutiti

Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a graphic designer and educator. Her work focuses on web design, video, print, and book art. She often includes hair braiding in her design work, and is "interested in the nuanced differences between black cultures". Her work includes printed materials for Black Lives Matter.

Mutiti graduated from the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts with a diploma in multimedia art in 2007. She graduated from the Yale School of Art with a MFA concentration in Graphic Design in 2012.

Mutiti was born in 1982 in Harare, Zimbabwe.

She is a co-founder of the Zimbabwe Cultural Centre in Detroit, which encourages collaboration between artists in Detroit and Zimbabwe.

She is a co-founder of Black Chalk & Co with partner Tinashe Mushakavanhu.

She is the artistic director and cofounder of Reading Zimbabwe, established in late 2016, a digital archive of Zimbabwean literature.

Mutiti is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Graphic Design department. She lives and works in New York City and Richmond, Virginia.

• Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015)
• Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship (2012)

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2017)
• We Buy Gold in Brooklyn, New York
• Whitney Museum in New York (2016)
• Studio Museum in Harlem (2015)
• Ruka (To Braid/ to knit/ to weave) at Recess Art (2014)
• Edwin Gallery in Michigan
• Yale's Davenport Art Gallery
• Syracuse University

Mutiti is best known for her artistic investigation of the technical crafts and social practices of hair braiding and self-fashioning in the African diaspora. For example, in a 2014 exhibition at Recess Art, Mutiti drew for inspiration from the space of an African hair braiding salon, as it might be found in New York City or Harare. Mutiti recreated aesthetic markers such as "walls painted in acid green or bright orange, magazine cut outs of celebrities, hair product models, flyers and posters from evangelical churches... [and] the ubiquitous small black television set on top of a cabinet playing Nollywood movies."Mutiti's interests extend from the aesthetics of hair salons to the forms of community and exchange that take place in them. In 2015, as part of Performa, she worked together with Chimurenga and Pan African Space Station to create a functional pop-up salon which hosted a series of conversations, including readings from stories that dealt directly with hair crafts such as Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare, Dambudzo and Binyavanga Wainaina’s One day I will write about this place.

Print

• A-A-A (folded posters, 2012)
• Thread (screen print on linoleum tiles, 2012–2014)
• African Hair Braiding Salon Reader (spiral bound booklet, laser print, 2014)
• The Laundromat Project (2014)
• RIP Kiki (2016)
• Requiem (2016)
• How to Wear Cloth (folded posters, fabric, paper, letterpress, 2016)
• Bootleg This (book cloth, book board, laser printed booklet, compact disk, 2016)
• 1960 Free (risograph and laser printing, spiral bound, 2016)
• Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter (BWAforBLM) (identity, banner, and ephemera, 2016)

Video

• Unbreakable (2011)
• Pain Revisited Excerpt (2015)
• Just Keep Swimming (2016)

Web

• Laundromat Project (website redesign, 2014)
• Braiding Braiding (2015)
• Reading Zimbabwe (2016)