Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu (born November 28, 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is an Ethiopian American abstract painter and printmaker whose canvases combine the structural elements of city grids, architectural drawings, and maps to create three-dimensional compositions representing the modern urban experience. Her works map the buildup of interactions between people, places, and sociopolitical forces including migration, economic mobility, memory, and history.

Early life and education

Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the first child of parents Assefa Mehretu, a professor of geography from Ethiopia, and Doree Mehretu, a teacher from the United States. The couple had met in 1968 while Assefa Mehretu was studying at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and the following year they moved to the capital of Ethiopia. In addition to Julie Mehretu, they had son David Mehretu and daughter Neesham Mehretu. The family fled Ethiopia in 1977 during a period of political turmoil and settled in East Lansing, Michigan, where Assefa Mehretu had been offered a teaching job at Michigan State University.

Julie Mehretu studied at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1992. During her junior year she traveled to Senegal, studying abroad at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar. After graduation Mehretu moved to New York City and eventually enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, studying painting and printmaking. At RISD Mehretu began to develop her visual language, experimenting with abstract ink drawings and black-and-white paintings. She developed a method in which she built up her paintings in layers, each one separated by clear acrylic paint.

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Early work

Upon graduating with an MFA degree in 1997, Mehretu was picked as a fellow for the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which supplies fellows with a studio, a stipend, and an exhibition at the museum. She began adding architectural drawings to her painted layers, working from images of buildings found on the Internet. She also started to work on a much larger scale, using canvases that reached 6 feet (1.83 meters) high and 7 feet (2.13 meters) wide. Her first works were sold through the Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston. In 1999 Mehretu returned to New York City and showed her work in group shows, including “Greater New York” (2001) at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (later MoMA PS1). Her first solo show was in 2001 at the Project, a Harlem gallery founded by art critic Christian Haye, who helped promote and sell Mehretu’s work.

Mehretu’s rise to prominence from then on was relatively rapid. She was offered a string of residencies, at the Studio Museum (2001) in Harlem, the Walker Art Center (2003) in Minneapolis, and the Headlands Center for the Arts (2003) in Sausalito, California, and her work was shown in exhibitions in Washington, D.C., London, Paris, Berlin, São Paulo, and Istanbul. It was also included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

The themes of Mehretu’s maturing art further crystallized. In addition to architectural drawings, her compositions began to include layers of colorful abstract shapes as well as reconstructed images using such visual vocabulary as flight patterns, corporate logos, flags, maps, comic strips, photographs from historical events, and military fortifications. In 2019 she told the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York: “I work with source material that I am interested in conceptually, politically, or even just visually.…I pull from all of this material, project it, trace it, break it up, recontextualize it, layer one on the other, and envelop it into the DNA of the painting.” Paintings such as Empirical Construction, Istanbul (2003), and the triptych Stadia I, Stadia II, and Stadia III (all 2004) depict urban spaces with their vectors of development and change overlaid and intersecting; taken all together, these movements create the identity of a city over time.

“Genius grant,” Mural (2008), and personal life

In 2005 Mehretu was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” That same year Mehretu’s longtime girlfriend, Australian artist Jessica Rankin, gave birth to their first son. The couple married in 2008 and had another son in 2011. They separated in 2014. In between these significant personal milestones, Mehretu showed her work at a major exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts (2007); created a cycle of new paintings for an exhibition (2009) at the Deutsche Guggenheim, the Berlin branch of the Guggenheim Museum, New York (closed 2012); and was awarded a commission for the Goldman Sachs building in New York City that opened in 2010. The resulting work, Mural (2008), was installed in the lobby and stretched 80 feet (24.38 meters) wide and 23 feet (7.01 meters) high. One of Mehretu’s best known works, the piece is made up of four layers composed of abstract shapes, calligraphic marks, and maps telling the history of capitalism.

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New directions

About 2011 Mehretu’s art started to shift away from the architectural drawings that grounded her early work. Instead she began her paintings with images—often of calamitous events, including riots, natural disasters, and refugee crises—and distorted them in Adobe Photoshop. She then layered the images with calligraphic black marks, airbrushed shapes, and multicolored benday dots. Reviewing her mid-career retrospective at the Whitney in 2021, The New York Times art critic Jason Farago observed: “The new paintings reveal their workings more slowly than before. They’re more haunted, and far more difficult.…They demand attention to form, and long minutes of looking. And even then—here is their pleasure, and their political potency—they will not give up all their secrets.”

Art market

In addition to critical recognition, Mehretu’s work also commands a strong market. Her paintings began selling for six figures at auction in 2010, and in 2023 her painting, Untitled (2001), broke the record for an African-born artist when it sold at auction for $9.32 million.