Julie Mehretu was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to an American teacher mother and Ethiopian Ethiopian college professor father. They fled the country in 1977 to escape political turmoil and moved to Michigan, for her father’s teaching position on economic geography at Michigan State University.
She has been named as one of Time Magazines 100 Most Influential People of 2020.
Julie is a contemporary visual artist, known for her multi-layered paintings of abstracted landscapes on a large scale. One influence on her subject matter is her father’s work as a geographer. In her words, Mehretu had “a subconscious awareness of his way of dissecting the world, to try to make sense of it.”
Mehretu’s canvases incorporate elements from technical drawings of a variety of urban buildings and linear illustrations of urban efficiency, including city grids and weather charts. Her drawings are similar to her paintings, with many layers forming complex, abstracted images of social interaction on the global scale.
Whilst Mehretu’s art is inspired by events taking place in Africa, she resists interpretations of her work that fail to see past her ethnicity. According to the artist, her work is not all about “blackness” or “otherness.” She believes that there is a failure to “simply accept and understand that a woman of African descent is making large, abstract paintings” and that this is a restrictive view of what artists of color can achieve.
