RUSUNUNGUKO (liberty/independence/freedom)
The Dome Gallery at Yale Schwarzman Center, New Haven, CT • schwarzman.yale.edu • Through June 28, 2026
A poetically rendered, site-specific vinyl installation by Zimbabwean-born visual artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti, RUSUNUNGUKO (liberty/independence/freedom) features braid forms made of black vinyl applied to the curved, light beige walls of a contemplative area in Yale University’s Schwarzman Center. Mutiti envisioned the space, a lobby for The Dome performance venue, as a potential node for social connection: “I chose this space in part because the platform feels like a stage where it would be nice to do something immersive, perhaps have someone do a performance there. I also was thinking about people gathering in the space before a show and then emptying out into it after.”
Mutiti is the director of graduate studies for graphic design at Yale School of Art and her work incorporates elements of design, conceptual art, sculpture, and social practice. This includes installations like Black Thang (2021)—concrete and resin sculptures molded from the packaging of black hair products—and RUKA (To knit/to braid/to weave) (2014)—a site-specific, salon-like installation that was activated by visitors and was inspired by Mutiti’s observation of “how motifs repeat in salons across the African diaspora,” including visually similar layouts, culturally specific television shows, and vendors dropping by to sell small, everyday items. In a 2020 lecture she shares, “A lot of my work started with an interest in…African hair braiding…and came out of me going to hair salons with my cousin Andrea in Harlem…[salons] really became a space for me to find kinship.”
Mutiti has used braided motifs since graduate school, yet until recently they were presented as tiling modules that conjured the digital and textual. RUSUNUNGUKO is the second project where she features loose, flowing braids that drape, spiral, and fall, some winking from beneath walls and doors like interloping vines. Unlike Mutiti’s earlier tiles, these larger-than-life braids reference the analog, naturally curving much like a single braid extension found on a floor or sidewalk. Mutiti explains, “With this piece, I’m thinking about tension and motion instead of modules and grids. The emphasis is on repetition. Where I break that repetition is the part that holds most of the messaging. The installation is highly codified, but when it breaks away from the repetition, things are opened up more for viewers to bring their own readings to it.”
The repeated shapes in RUSUNUNGUKO are also inspired by the historic banisters’ frond-like wrought iron design. Where the railing posts have a flower on either end, Mutiti’s braids end in shapes that intimate loose hair and reach toward each other at the walls’ centerlines yet never touch. As one sits with the installation, these points of potential connection begin to feel alchemical—as though they are personifying human connection, the need for it, the hope of it, the missed opportunities to create it. It is a feeling reminiscent of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam where, as two fingers almost touch, our attention is directed to potentiality, to the genesis available in the empty space between two entities.
There are two other notable instances when the installation’s patterns break: the interspersed knots of loosely tied braids; and the moments when braids intersect with institutional signage like fire alarms and room labels. The knots are patterns that Mutiti gleaned from research, “When I work on something I collect a lot of things first. I’ve been collecting a lot of images of knots, some are nautical, some are traditional Chinese.…Knots are really good at holding for a long time, a powerful, labor-intensive technology that is intimate, analog, and that we do with our hands.” While the installation is calming and lyrical and the architecture is grand and historic, this exhibition is also located at Yale University, a monumental institution. Within that context, the vertical braids periodically intersect with wall signs that the University deems necessary for wayfinding or safety compliance. Mutiti did not plan for the braids to jarringly crisscross with these signs yet also did not rearrange things to avoid them. In part due to choices like these, RUSUNUNGUKO is not only a visceral installation but an honest one—one that simultaneously embraces a location and the people who use it while also unflinchingly recognizing what its location within a prestigious place of higher learning brings to the enterprise.
—Terri C Smith