Julie Mehretu Biography

Julie Mehretu is a contemporary visual artist, well known for her multi-layered paintings of abstracted landscapes on a large scale. Her paintings, drawings, and prints depict the cumulative effects of urban sociopolitical changes through the landscape’s alteration of architecture, topography, and iconography.

Julie Mehretu Family

Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970, the first child of an Ethiopian college professor and an American teacher. They fled the country in 1977 to escape political turmoil and moved to East Lansing, Michigan, for her father’s teaching position on economic geography at Michigan State University.

Julie Mehretu Education

Mehretu received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and did a junior year abroad at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, then attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1997.

She moved to New York in 1999, now living in New York City with her partner and studio-mate Jessica Rankin. Mehretu’s mother-in-law is Australian author and poet Lily Brett and her father-in-law is celebrated by Australian artist David Rankin.

Julie Mehretu Net Worth

The 2013 sale of Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation (2001) gave Julie Mehretuher record at auction ($4.6 million).

Julie Mehretu Drawings

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.  The pieces do not contain any formal, consistent sense of depth, instead of utilizing multiple points of view and perspective ratios to construct flattened re-imaginings of city life.

Her drawings are similar to her paintings, with many layers forming complex, abstracted images of social interaction on a global scale. The relatively smaller-scale drawings are opportunities for exploration made during the time between paintings.

While best known for large-scale abstract paintings, Mehretu has experimented with prints since graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was enrolled in the painting and printmaking program in the mid-1990s. Her exploration of printmaking began with etching.

She has completed collaborative projects at professional printmaking studios across America, among them Highpoint Editions in Minneapolis, Crown Point Press in San Francisco, Gemini G.E.L.in Los Angeles, and Derrière L’Etoile Studios and Burnet Editions in New York City.

Mehretu was a resident of the CORE Program, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Artist-in-Residence Program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. During a residency at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 2003, she worked with thirty high school girls from East Africa. In 2007, she led a monthlong residency program with 40 art students from Detroit public high schools. In the spring of 2007, she was the Guna S. Mundheim Visual Arts Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Julie Mehretu Awards

• In 2000, Mehretu was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. She was the recipient of the 2001 Penny McCall Award. On September 20, 2005, she was named as one of the 2005 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the genius grant.
• In 2007, while completing a residency at the American Academy in Berlin, Julie Mehretu received the 15th commission of the Deutsche Bank and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The body of work she created, Grey Area, was composed of six large-scale paintings, completed between 2007 and 2009 in a studio in Berlin.
• In 2013, Mehretu was awarded the Barnett and Annalee Newman Award and in 2015 Mehretu received the US Department of State Medal of Arts from Secretary of State John Kerry.

Julie Mehretu Collections

Mehretu’s works are held in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the San Diego Museum of Art. Although located in a private office building lobby, her 23′ x 80′ mural commissioned for the new Goldman Sachs tower in New York City is viewable from the sidewalk windows.

In 2016, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissioned Mehretu to create a diptych, with each massive painting flanking the staircase in the atrium which is accessible and free to the public. HOWL, eon (I, II) was first exhibited to the public on September 2, 2017, and the SFMOMA plans to display the paintings for at least three years.

In 2001, Mehretu participated in the exhibition Painting at the Edge of the World at the Walker Art Center. She later was one of 38 artists whose work was exhibited in the 2004-5 Carnegie International: A Final Look. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including one at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

Her work has appeared in FreeStyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem; The Americans at the Barbican Gallery in London; White Cube gallery in London (2002), the Busan Biennale in Korea.