Julie Mehretu (born November 28, 1970) is an
Ethiopian American
Ethiopian Americans are Americans of People of Ethiopia, Ethiopian descent, as well as individuals of American and Ethiopian ancestry.
History
In 1919, an official Ethiopian goodwill mission was sent to the United States to congratulate the Al ...
contemporary
visual artist, known for her multi-layered paintings of abstracted landscapes on a large scale. Her paintings, drawings, and prints depict the cumulative effects of urban sociopolitical changes.
Mehretu is included in
''Time''s 100 Most Influential People of 2020. The following year, ''
The New York Times'' described her as a "rare example of a contemporary Black female painter who has already entered the canon."
In October 2023, Mehretu broke the auction record for an African artist at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, with her piece ''Untitled'' (2001), which sold for $9.32 million.
Early life and education
Mehretu was born in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970, the first child of an Ethiopian college professor of geography and a Jewish American
Montessori teacher. They fled the country in 1977 to escape political turmoil and moved to
East Lansing, Michigan, for her father's teaching position in economic geography at
Michigan State University
Michigan State University (Michigan State, MSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, the fi ...
.
[Calvin Tomkins (March 29, 2010).]
Big Art, Big Money: Julie Mehretu's 'Mural' for Goldman Sachs
. '' The New Yorker''. Retrieved August 4, 2017.
A graduate of
East Lansing High School, Mehretu received a Bachelor of Arts degree from
Kalamazoo College in
Kalamazoo, Michigan
Kalamazoo ( ) is a city in the southwest region of the U.S. state of Michigan. It is the county seat of Kalamazoo County. At the 2010 census, Kalamazoo had a population of 74,262. Kalamazoo is the major city of the Kalamazoo-Portage Metropolit ...
, and did a junior year abroad at
Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD) in
Dakar, Senegal, then attended the
Rhode Island School of Design in
Providence, Rhode Island, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1997.
She was chosen for the CORE program at the
Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, a residency that provided a studio, a stipend, and an exhibition at the museum.
[Calvin Tomkins (March 22, 2010)]
Big Art, Big Money
'' The New Yorker''.
Art career
Mehretu's canvases incorporate elements from technical drawings of various urban buildings and linear illustrations of urban efficiency, including city grids and weather charts. The pieces do not contain any formal, consistent sense of depth, instead utilizing multiple points of view and perspective ratios to construct flattened re-imaginings of city life.
[Julie Mehretu](_blank)
White Cube
White Cube is a contemporary art gallery founded by Jay Jopling in London in 1993. The gallery has two branches in London: White Cube Mason's Yard in central London and White Cube Bermondsey in South East London; White Cube Hong Kong, in Centra ...
, London. Her drawings are similar to her paintings, with many layers forming complex, abstracted images of social interaction on a global scale.
[Julie Mehretu — New Drawings, February 1 – March 16, 2008](_blank)
Kresge Art Museum, Michigan State University
Michigan State University (Michigan State, MSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, the fi ...
. The relatively smaller-scale drawings are opportunities for exploration made during the time between paintings.
In 2002, Mehretu said of her work:
''Emperial Construction, Istanbul'' (2004) exemplifies Mehretu's use of layers in a city's history.
Arabic lettering and forms that reference Arabic script scatter around the canvas.
In ''Stadia I, II'', and ''III'' (2004) Mehretu conveys the cultural importance of the
stadium
A stadium ( : stadiums or stadia) is a place or venue for (mostly) outdoor sports, concerts, or other events and consists of a field or stage either partly or completely surrounded by a tiered structure designed to allow spectators to stand o ...
through marks and layers of flat shape. Each ''Stadia'' contains an architectural outline of a stadium, abstracted flags of the world, and references to corporate logos.
''Mogamma: A Painting in Four Parts'' (2012), the collective name for four monumental canvases that were included in
dOCUMENTA (13), relates to 'Al-Mogamma', the name of the all purpose government building in
Tahrir Square
Tahrir Square ( ar, ميدان التØرير ', , English language, English: Liberation Square), also known as "Martyr Square", is a major public town square in downtown Cairo, Egypt. The square has been the location and focus for political dem ...
, Cairo which was both instrumental in the 2011 revolution and architecturally symptomatic of Egypt's post-colonial past. The word 'Mogamma', however, means 'collective' in Arabic and historically, has been used to refer to a place that shares a mosque, a synagogue and a church and is a place of multi faith. A later work, ''The Round City, Hatshepsut'' (2013) contains architectural traces of
Baghdad, Iraq itself – its title referring to the historical name given to the city in ancient maps. Another painting, ''Insile'' (2013) built up from a photo image of Believers' Palace amid civilian buildings, activates its surface with painterly ink gestures, blurring and effacing the ruins beneath.
In 2007, the investment bank
Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs () is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered at 200 West Street in Lower Manhattan, with regional headquarters in London, Warsaw, Bangalore, H ...
gave Mehretu a $5 million commission for a lobby mural. The resulting work, "Mural", was the size of a tennis court and consisted of overlaid financial maps, architectural drawings of financial institutions, and references to works by other artists.
Calvin Tomkins of the ''
New Yorker'' called it "the most ambitious painting I've seen in a dozen years",
and another commentator described it as "one of the largest and most successful public art works in recent times".
While best known for large-scale abstract paintings, Mehretu has experimented with prints since graduate school at the
Rhode Island School of Design, where she was enrolled in the painting and printmaking program in the mid-1990s. Her exploration of printmaking began with etching. She has completed collaborative projects at professional printmaking studios across America, among them Highpoint Editions in Minneapolis, Crown Point Press in San Francisco,
Gemini G.E.L.
Gemini G.E.L., formally Gemini Ltd., is an artists‘ workshop, exhibition space, and publisher of limited edition Printmaking, prints and sculptures, located at 8365 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, California.
History
Gemini Ltd. was founded in ...
in Los Angeles, and
Derrière L'Etoile Studios and Burnet Editions in New York City.
Mehretu was a resident of the CORE Program, Glassell School of Art,
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. With the recent completion of an eight-year campus redevelopment project, including the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Build ...
(1997–98) and the Artist-in-Residence Program at the
Studio Museum
The Studio Museum in Harlem is an American art museum devoted to the work of artists of African descent. The museum's galleries are currently closed in preparation for a building project that will replace the current building, located at 144 W ...
in Harlem (2001). During a residency at the
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 2003, she worked with thirty high school girls from East Africa. In the spring of 2007 she was the Guna S. Mundheim Visual Arts Fellow at the
American Academy in Berlin.
[Fellow: Julie Mehretu](_blank)
American Academy in Berlin, Berlin. Later that year, she led a monthlong residency program with 40 art students from Detroit public high schools.
[Hilarie M. Sheets (November 11, 2007)]
Industrial Strength in the Motor City
'' New York Times''.
During her residency in Berlin, Mehretu was commissioned to create seven paintings by the
Deutsche Guggenheim; titled ''Grey Area'' (2008–2009), the series explores the urban landscape of Berlin as a historical site of generation and destruction.
The painting ''Vanescere'' (2007), a black-and-white composition that depicts what appears to be a maelstrom of ink and acrylic marks, some of which are sanded away on the surface of the linen support, propelled a layering process of subtraction in the ''Grey Area'' series. Parts of ''Fragment'' (2008–09) and ''Middle Grey'' (2007–09) feature this erasing technique. Another in the series that was painted in Berlin, ''Berliner Plätze'' (2008–09), holds a phantom presence of overlapped outlines of nineteenth-century German buildings that float as a translucent mass in the frame. The art historian Sue Scott has this to say of the ''Grey Area'' series: "In these somber, simplified tonal paintings, many of which were based on the facades of beautiful nineteenth-century buildings destroyed in World War II, one gets the sense of buildings in the process of disappearing, much like the history of the city she was depicting."
As Mehretu explains in ''Ocula'' Magazine, "The whole idea of 20th-century progress and ideas of futurity and modernity have been shattered, in a way. All of this is what is informing how I am trying to think about space."
Mehretu is a member of the Artists Committee of
Americans for the Arts.
Recognition
In 2000, Mehretu was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. She was the recipient of the 2001 Penny McCall Award and one of the 2005 recipients of the
MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant."
In 2013, Mehretu was awarded the Barnett and Annalee Newman Award, and in 2015, she received the
US Department of State Medal of Arts from
Secretary of State John Kerry. In 2020, ''
Time'' magazine included Mehretu in its list of the
100 most influential people
''Time'' 100 (often stylized as ''TIME'' 100) is an annual listicle of the 100 most influential people in the world, assembled by the American news magazine ''Time''. First published in 1999 as the result of a debate among American academics, po ...
. In 2023, German automaker
BMW selected Mehretu to paint its annual "art car" for entry at the
24 Hours of Le Mans
The 24 Hours of Le Mans (french: link=no, 24 Heures du Mans) is an endurance-focused Sports car racing, sports car race held annually near the town of Le Mans, France. It is the world's oldest active Endurance racing (motorsport), endurance r ...
race.
Notable works in public collections
*''Blue Field'' (1997),
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. With the recent completion of an eight-year campus redevelopment project, including the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Build ...
*''Babel Unleashed'' (2001),
Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis
*''Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation'' (2001),
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art,
Bentonville, Arkansas
*''Congress'' (2003),
The Broad,
Los Angeles
*''Empirical Construction, Istanbul'' (2003),
Museum of Modern Art,
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* '' ...
*''Entropia (review)'' (2004),
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...
, New York
*''Stadia I'' (2004),
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
*''Stadia II'' (2004),
Carnegie Museum of Art,
Pittsburgh
*''Stadia III'' (2004),
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,
Richmond
Richmond most often refers to:
* Richmond, Virginia, the capital of Virginia, United States
* Richmond, London, a part of London
* Richmond, North Yorkshire, a town in England
* Richmond, British Columbia, a city in Canada
* Richmond, California, ...
*''Local Calm'' (2005),
San Diego Museum of Art
*''Atlantic Wall'' (2008-2009),
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...
, New York
*''
Mural'' (2009),
200 West Street
200 West Street is the global headquarters of the Goldman Sachs investment banking firm in the Battery Park City neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The building is a , 44-story building located on West Street, between Vesey and Murr ...
,
New York City
*''Auguries'' (2010), The Broad,
Los Angeles and
National Museum of African Art,
Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
*''Untitled'' (2011),
Studio Museum in Harlem
The Studio Museum in Harlem is an American art museum devoted to the work of artists of African descent. The museum's galleries are currently closed in preparation for a building project that will replace the current building, located at 144 W ...
, New York
*''Mogamma, A Painting in Four Parts: Part 3'' (2012),
Tate,
London
*''Mogamma, A Painting in Four Parts: Part 4'' (2012), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
*''Cairo'' (2013), The Broad, Los Angeles
*''Invisible Sun (algorithm 5, second letter form)'' (2014), Museum of Modern Art, New York
*''Myriads, Only by Dark'' (2014),
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...
, Washington, D.C.; and
Pérez Art Museum Miami
*''A Love Supreme'' (2014-2018),
Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago's Grant Park, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 mill ...
*''Hineni (E. 3:4) (Me voici)'' (2018),
Centre Pompidou,
Paris
*''Haka (and Riot)'' (2019),
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
*''Conversion (S.M. del Popolo/after C.)'' (2019-2020),
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
In 2016, the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissioned Mehretu to create a diptych, with each massive painting flanking the staircase in the atrium which is accessible and free to the public. ''HOWL, eon (I, II)'' (2016-2017) was first exhibited to the public on September 2, 2017. To facilitate the creation of the scale of the diptych, Mehretu used a decommissioned church in Harlem as her studio to create. Throughout the creation of her piece, she collaborated with jazz pianist
Jason Moran. ''HOWL, eon (I, II)'' is a political commentary on the history of the western United States' landscape, including the San Francisco Bay Area. The foundation of each work contains digitally abstracted photos from recent race riots, street protests, and nineteenth-century images of the
American West
The Western United States (also called the American West, the Far West, and the West) is the region comprising the westernmost states of the United States. As American settlement in the U.S. expanded westward, the meaning of the term ''the Wes ...
.
Exhibitions
In 2001, Mehretu participated in the exhibition ''Painting at the Edge of the World'' at the
Walker Art Center. She later was one of 38 artists whose work was exhibited in the 2004-5 ''Carnegie International'': A Final Look. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including one at the
Center for Curatorial Studies
Founded in 1990, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is an exhibition and research center dedicated to the study of art and exhibition practices from the 1960s to the present. The Center initiated its graduate program in 1994 ...
,
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2000). Her work has appeared in ''
Freestyle
Freestyle may refer to:
Brands
* Reebok Freestyle, a women's athletic shoe
* Ford Freestyle, an SUV automobile
* Coca-Cola Freestyle, a vending machine
* ICD Freestyle, a paintball marker
* Abbott FreeStyle, a blood glucose monitor by Abbott La ...
'' exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001); ''The Americans'' at the Barbican Gallery in London (2001); White Cube gallery in London (2002), the Busan Biennale in Korea (2002); the 8th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius, Lithuania (2002); and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (2002) at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mehretu's work was also included in the "In Praise of Doubt" exhibition at the
Palazzo Grassi in Venice in the summer of 2011 as well as
dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012. In 2014, she participated in ''The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists'', curated by
Simon Njami
Simon Njami (born 1962 in Lausanne) is a writer and an independent curator, lecturer, art critic and essayist.
He published his first novel "Cercueil et Cie" in 1985, followed by "Les Enfants de la Cité" in 1987, and "Les Clandestins" and "Afri ...
.
In 2021, the
Whitney Museum of American Art devoted an entire floor to a retrospective of Mehretu's career.
Art market
Mehretu's painting ''Untitled 1'' (2001) sold for $1.02 million at
Sotheby's in September 2010. Its estimated value had been $600–$800,000. At
Art Basel in 2014, White Cube sold Mehretu's ''Mumbo Jumbo'' (2008) for $5 million. In 2023,
Michael Ovitz
Michael Steven Ovitz (born December 14, 1946) is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He was a talent agent who co-founded Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in 1975 and served as its chairman until 1995. Ovitz later served as preside ...
sold Mehretu’s ''Walkers With the Dawn and Morning'' (2008) for $10.7 million, setting a new record both for the artist herself and any artist born in Africa.
In 2005, Mehretu's work was the object of the ''Lehmann v. The Project Worldwide'' case before the
New York Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the State of New York is the trial-level court of general jurisdiction in the New York State Unified Court System. (Its Appellate Division is also the highest intermediate appellate court.) It is vested with unlimited civ ...
, the first case brought by a collector regarding their right to secure primary access to contemporary art.
The case involved legal issues over her work and the right of first refusal contracts between her then-gallery and a collector. In return for a $75,000 loan by the collector Jean-Pierre Lehmann to the Project Gallery, made in February 2001, the gallery was to give Lehmann a right of first refusal on any work by any artist the gallery represented, and at a 30 per cent discount until the loan was repaid. Lehmann saw this loan as direct access to Mehretu's work, however, there were four other individuals who were also given right of first choice from the gallery's represented artists. The gallery sold 40 works by Mehretu during the period of the contract, with some offered for discounts of up to 40 percent.
Lehmann saw that several Mehretu pieces available in the catalog of the Walker Art Center had been sold to collector Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, and suspected that the agreement was not being kept.
He subsequently wrote Haye demanding $17,500, and, after no offer of Mehretu pieces was made, he filed suit.
The case, eventually won by Lehmann, revealed to a wider public precisely what prices and discounts galleries offer various collectors on paintings by Mehretu and other contemporary artists - information normally concealed by the art world.
Personal life
Mehretu lives in a two-story house in Harlem.
[Jori Finkel (March 7, 2021)]
Inside Julie Mehretu’s Richly Layered World
'' W''. She married artist
Jessica Rankin in 2008, with whom she has two sons, Cade Elias (born 2005) and Haile (born 2011);
her mother-in-law is author and poet
Lily Brett.
The couple separated in 2014.
Mehretu maintains a studio in Chelsea near the
Whitney Museum of American Art.
In 2004, she co-founded – together with Lawrence Chua and Paul Pfeiffer – Denniston Hill, an artist residency on a 200-acre campus in
Sullivan County, New York.
She also worked from an old arms factory in Berlin in 2007
and the former
St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem from 2016 to 2017.
[Hilarie M. Sheets (August 3, 2017)]
In an Unused Harlem Church, a Towering Work of a ‘Genius’
'' New York Times''.
References
Further reading
*
External links
Website of her gallery carlier , gebauer including CV and works*
ttp://www.walkerart.org/archive/2/AF7361E991C363206165.htm Julie Mehretu at Walker Art Center, Minneapolisbr>
Julie Mehretu interviewed for Ethiopian Passages2010 article including an image of ''Untitled 1''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mehretu, Julie
American contemporary painters
Ethiopian painters
American abstract artists
Ethiopian emigrants to the United States
MacArthur Fellows
People from East Lansing, Michigan
Kalamazoo College alumni
Rhode Island School of Design alumni
1970 births
Living people
American women printmakers
Ethiopian LGBT artists
LGBT people from Michigan
LGBT people from New York (state)
20th-century American painters
20th-century American women painters
20th-century American printmakers
21st-century American women painters
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
American lesbian artists
20th-century American LGBT people
21st-century American LGBT people