Sophy Feldman
Art 121
29 October 2020
Julie Mehretu: Recontextulizing History
Julie Mehretu was born in Ethiopia in 1970, but at the age of 7 years old was forced to escape on account of the political violence brought up by the Derg’s campaign of terror. They settled in Michigan where Mehretu earned a BA from Kalamazoo College, Michigan (1992), and then went on to receive an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (1997).
Mehretu’s familial history can be seen as an early indicator of what would shape her later artistic career as displacement and associations to place would become key, overriding themes. She has explained that, “Coming from this African background, you’re the children of people who were there during decolonisation, when the world really fundamentally shifted … Now we’re all dislocated … and there’s this constant negotiating of place, space, ideals, ideas.”
Now based in Harlem, New York, she is best known for large-scale abstract paintings layered with a variety of mediums, marks, and meanings. These canvases and works on paper refer to the history of art, architecture, and past civilizations while addressing the most immediate conditions of our contemporary moment, including migration, revolution, climate change, global capitalism, and technology.
- “Julie Mehretu.” Marian Goodman, www.mariangoodman.com/artists/51-julie-mehretu/.
- This website allowed me to learn more about the background and biography of Julie Mehretu. For over forty years, Marian Goodman Gallery has played an important role in introducing European artists to American audiences and helping to establish a vital dialogue among artists and institutions working internationally. Julie Mehretu is one of the artists that is considered to be in a group of artists that are leaders of their generation.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcM3lF4Es_s
- This video/interview with Mehretu helps provide information of how she works as an artist and more specifically in her HOWL Process. She begins by referencing the ways that landscapes have been politicized through historical events of the American West, colonialism, war, and abolition, through to more recent race riots and social protests. Then, Mehretu began by combining photographs from these events with nineteenth-century landscape paintings. Abstracting and digitizing the blended forms, she printed the resulting images on two monumental canvases, each spanning more than eight hundred square feet. Over these underpaintings, Mehretu adds gestural, calligraphic brush strokes before screen printing an additional, compiling layer of pixelated images. She works on an extremely large scale, and you get to see how her team helps her create her vision.
- “Julie Mehretu.” High Museum of Art, high.org/exhibition/julie-mehretu/.
- The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia is currently showcasing an exhibition on Julie Mehretu. This source was pivotal in my research due to the fact that it allowed for me to learn about individual subject matter with in-depth conversation about individual exhibition pieces. I was able to learn more about Berliner Plätze, Epigraph, Damascus, Haka, and Stadia II.