It Starts with a Question: Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu, (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) engages us in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space. Mehretu’s work is informed by a multitude of sources including politics, literature, and music. Most recently her paintings have incorporated photographic images from broadcast media that depict conflict, injustice, and social unrest. These graphic images act as intellectual and compositional points of departure; ultimately occluded on the canvas, they remain as a phantom presence in the highly abstracted gestural completed works. Mehretu’s practice in painting, drawing and printmaking equally assert the role of art to provoke thought and reflection, and express the contemporary condition of the individual and society. 

Mehretu is the winner of numerous prestigious awards, including the Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2025, the MacArthur Fellowship in 2005, and the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts Award in 2015, named as one of the “100 most influential people”by Time magazine in 2020, and membership to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2021. In addition, Mehretu designed the 20th BMW Art Car (2024) and created an eighty-five-foot-by-twenty-five-foot glass mural, entitled Uprising of the Sun, for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago (2024). 

Her work has been exhibited extensively in museums and biennials including the Carnegie International (2004–05), Sydney Biennial (2006), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010), dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), Sharjah Biennial (2015), Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2017), La Biennale di Venezia (2019), LACMA, LA (2020), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2021), Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2024), K21, Dusseldorf, Germany (2025), Warsaw MSN, Poland (2026). Mehretu lives and works in New York City.