Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu is an Ethiopian American contemporary visual artist recognized for her large-scale, multi-layered paintings that explore abstracted landscapes. Her paintings, drawings, and prints examine the cumulative effects of urban sociopolitical changes. Mehretu’s work frequently incorporates elements of mapping and architecture, creating a calligraphic complexity that evokes turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Architectural renderings and aerial views of urban grids appear as fragments, challenging narrow geographic and cultural interpretations.

Drawing from the histories of art and human civilization, including Babylonian stelae, architectural sketches, European history painting, and the symbols of African liberation movements, Mehretu creates new forms and visual resonances. Her approach to abstract painting engages with themes of spatial complexity, historical memory, and global systems.

Mehretu earned a Master of Fine Arts degree with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her career gained international momentum through residencies at the CORE Program at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Artist-in-Residence Program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. A significant commission from Goldman Sachs resulted in "Mural," a large-scale work featuring overlaid financial maps, architectural drawings, and references to other artists. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissioned Mehretu to create the diptych "HOWL, eon (I, II)," which flanks the staircase in the museum’s atrium. The Obama Foundation features her commissioned work, "Uprising of the Sun," on the north facade of the Obama Presidential Center’s Museum Building.

A comprehensive retrospective of Mehretu’s career spans more than two decades, examining history, colonialism, capitalism, geopolitics, war, global uprising, diaspora, and displacement through abstraction, architecture, landscape, movement, and figuration. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The High Museum in Atlanta, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, The Walker Museum of Art in Minneapolis, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, dOCUMENTA (13), the International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Palazzo Grassi-Pinault Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, and K21 in Düsseldorf.

Mehretu has received numerous awards, including the Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture, the MacArthur Fellowship, the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts Award, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has also been honored with the Barnett and Annalee Newman Award and was included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people. Mehretu is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and The National Academy of Design.

Beyond her studio practice, Mehretu advocates for social justice and access to the arts. She has supported the movement to end mass incarceration by donating a painting to Rockefeller Philanthropies for the Art For Justice Fund, raising $6.5 million. Mehretu also contributed to the Whitney's Free 25 and Under program, promoting greater access to art for young people and emerging artists. Her innovative approach to abstract painting has influenced a generation of artists, expanding the field to include socio-political discourse through the layering of architectural plans, meteorological data, and protest imagery.