Woman In Art, Julie Mehretu

“That’s what I’m interested in: the space in between, the moment of imagining what is possible and yet not knowing what that is” – Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu is an Ethiopian-American painter, printmaker, and draftsman. As a contemporary artist, Mehretu uses grand-scale artworks to examine society's connections with place and identity. Her works are known as abstracted “maps” that bring geography, culture, history, and politics into a new perspective. 

Mehretu uses shape, depth, texture, and color to create her pieces. The use of lines and geometric shapes in her “maps” creates complex compositions. Mehretu’s style of lines, dots, symbols, and shapes create large-scale works lending to an evocative and complete visual experience. Mehretu utilizes a layering technique that helps to create depth in her artworks. In addition to the atmospheric perspective in her pieces, the aerial view also enhances the depth and perception elements of the art. The overlapping combination of multiple materials –acrylic, ink, and printmaking– enhances visual texture. Mehretu utilizes color in some of her pieces as well.

This layered approach defines her 2021 four-part painting, Mogamma, which connects multiple places and ideas across its canvases. Like many of Mehretu’s works, each painting follows the style of an aerial perspective that resembles a bird’s-eye view of damaged land, debris, and dust left over from explosions. The movement of brushwork to create color gradients is evident across the painting, for instance, in Mogamma Part 2, the top of the painting uses dark, deep black ink and acrylic, but as the painting progresses down the canvas, the color becomes lighter; it smooths and blends out into this smoky grayscale color while still keeping the structure of a map and enhancing the aerial view of land.

Like various works of Julie Mehretu, the Mogamma is infused with historical, cultural and political narratives of global issues. Specifically, Mehretu brought together drawings of public spaces, or “communities,” where uprisings have occurred, Tahrir Square in Cairo, Red Square in Moscow, Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana, Assahabah Square in Darnah, and Zuccotti Park in New York City. Mehretu used the Mogamma to explore public sites as communal places of political conflict and visibly represented what she thinks, that art and politics are interconnected: "I don't think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power.” Mehretu reflects personal experience in Mogamma. She speaks about the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement in the United States, she remarks, “I was born in the midst of the utopianist gestures on the continent of Africa ... there was a very different perception of and sense of possibility of what a place could be, but that completely fell apart ... The failure of this optimism comprised most of my life." Here, it’s understood that Mehretu composed the Mogamma as a thought-provoking piece on the complexities of contemporary society. The Mogamma highlights social issues and migration through the blending of materials, creating a sense of movement. The lines across the paintings suggest movement, direction, and guidance, away from chaos, yet they lead towards a different chaos.

 Identity, in Mogamma, is the layered imagery of homes left behind, traveling to urban environments, and globalization. All representing a vast four-part painting of complete chaos and destruction, with the modern world sitting on top. The Mogamma represents the generations of families that have migrated from one chaotic home to a new chaotic home, giving that new generation a place to inhabit. 

For many students across New York City and the United States, this layered history reflects our living reality as first, second, and third generation immigrants.Like many of my peers whose families crossed oceans in search of stability, my own  great grandparents migrated from India and Portugal to Guyana, before my grandparents and parents eventually moved to America. Across our diverse student community, we carry these inherited stories of displacement and adaptation into the new homes and neighborhoods we share today. 

Mogamma layers these generations of migration until reaching the modern world, creating the “mapping” that Mehretu puts on top of her “communities.” That mapp;ing represents the exact intersection  where we, as students, live today– a space shaped by global movement, cultural blending, and shared resilience. Ultimately, Mehretu’s work shows that the chaos of the past doesn’t subside over time, it simply changes location as eras pass.