Julie Mehretu Art

Maps of Motion, Traces of Time

A Beginning Between Worlds

Julie Mehretu was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, into a family already attuned to the crossroads of culture and politics. Her father, an Ethiopian professor, and her American mother left their homeland during the turbulence of the mid-1970s, resettling in Michigan. That early dislocation—leaving one map for another—would become a quiet undertone in Mehretu’s career. She has often said that her work carries the marks of migration and history’s upheavals, translated into abstract, layered compositions.

Marian Goodman Gallery

“Julie Mehretu’s works engage us in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space.”

VISIT GALLERY

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A Language of Layers

Mehretu studied at Kalamazoo College before earning her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. From the outset, her canvases felt less like flat surfaces and more like architectural sites. She built them up in strata: sweeping lines like flight paths, shards of architectural blueprints, marks that resemble weather maps or the frantic tracks of a city in motion. To stand before one of her vast paintings is to feel both dizzy and deeply grounded—as if you are caught between aerial view and street-level chaos.

Expansive Murals, Expansive Ideas

Her breakout moment came in the early 2000s, when Mehretu began producing monumental works that stretched across museum walls. Commissioned for places like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Goldman Sachs’ headquarters in New York, her murals aren’t static decorations but living geographies. They hum with the sense of a world forever in flux: migration routes, revolutions, rebuilding, collapse, and resilience.

The Gesture of History

One of Mehretu’s most powerful gifts is her ability to translate collective memory into gesture. She often begins by sourcing maps, blueprints, or news photographs—traces of how humans order and disorder space. These fragments become the scaffolding over which she layers gestural sweeps of paint and ink. The results are works that feel like palimpsests of civilization itself: empires rising and fading, cities erased and redrawn, the human hand forever in motion.

A Place in the Present

Today, Julie Mehretu’s paintings hang in the world’s most prominent collections, from the Whitney to the Tate. In 2021, she became the first woman of color commissioned to design a major painting for the Whitney Museum’s Fifth Floor galleries. Yet despite her global acclaim, her work remains deeply personal—a meditation on belonging, displacement, and the fractured beauty of modern life.

Why It Matters

In an era when headlines can feel overwhelming, Mehretu gives us a way to see our shared turbulence with clarity and grace. Her canvases remind us that even chaos has form, and that our migrations, displacements, and rebuildings are part of a larger story of resilience. Standing before her work, one feels both small and infinite—a single line in a vast, ever-changing map.