Julie Mehretu, Retopistics: A Renegade Evacuation, 2001. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR. © Julie Mehretu, photo: Erma Estwick.
The Walker Art Center will be the final stop on a national tour of the exhibition Julie Mehretu, the first-ever comprehensive retrospective on the artist’s work. Born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and based in New York, Mehretu is best known for abstract paintings layered with a variety of materials, marks, and meanings. Her canvases and works on paper reference the histories of art, architecture, and past civilizations while addressing some of the most immediate conditions of our contemporary moment, including migration, revolution, climate change, global capitalism, and technology.
Featuring more than 60 paintings and works on paper from 1996 to the present, this midcareer survey reflects the breadth of Mehretu’s multilayered practice, which moves nimbly across mediums, scale, and subject matter. The presentation covers a broad arc of Mehretu’s artistic evolution, revealing her early focus on drawing, graphics, and mapping and her more recent introduction of bold gestures, sweeps of saturated color, and figurative elements into her immersive, large-scale works.
Mehretu’s paintings often begin with a process of drawing; she then develops the works by layering techniques such as printing, digital collage, erasure, and painterly abstraction. She is inspired by a variety of sources, including cave paintings, cartography, 17th-century landscape etchings, architectural renderings, graffiti, and, in her most recent work, news photographs of world events. Drawing on this vast archive, she explores how realities of the past and present can shape human consciousness. Mehretu sees her commitment to abstraction—and its relationship to freedom—as a means of having agency as an artist. Through her work, she has framed social uprisings, including the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street, as well as specific events like the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; wildfires in California; and the burning of Rohingya villages in Myanmar. At its core, Mehretu’s art is invested in lived experiences, giving powerful visual form to both the past and our current moment. As the artist says, her visual language represents how “history is made: one layer on top of another, erasing itself, consuming itself, inventing something else from the same thing.”
Julie Mehretu
October 16, 2021–March 6, 2022
Julie Mehretu was co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, with major support from the Ford Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Curatorial Team
Christine Y. Kim, Curator of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; with Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Walker’s presentation is coordinated by Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director, Visual Arts.
Exhibition Tour
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles: November 3, 2019–September 7, 2020
High Museum of Art, Atlanta: October 24, 2020–January 31, 2021
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: March 19–August 8, 2021
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis: October 16, 2021–March 6, 2022
Related Events
After Hours: Julie Mehretu
Friday, October 15, 8:30 pm
Free for members ($20 for nonmembers)
Be the first to see and celebrate Julie Mehretu. Guests will enjoy late night bites toast the exhibition with specialty cocktails, dance to DJ sets and live music, and drop into an art-making workshop.
Opening-Day Talk: Julie Mehretu in conversation with Glenn Ligon and Kemi Ilesanmi
Saturday, October 16, 4 pm
Walker Cinema, Free
Join us for a conversation between internationally acclaimed artists Julie Mehretu and Glenn Ligon, moderated by Kemi Ilesanmi (executive director of the Laundromat Project). On the occasion of Mehretu’s nationally-touring mid-career survey, the three will discuss contemporary abstraction as a means of examining global geopolitics, contested American histories, and our current moment. Ilesanmi led the Walker Art Center’s Artists-in-Residence program between 1998 and 2004 and helped make early introductions of Ligon’s and Mehretu’s works to both Twin Cities and international communities.
This experience will also be offered as a livestream to watch remotely.
Free tickets available at the Main Lobby desk beginning at 3 pm.
Check here for important COVID-19 vaccination, testing, and mask requirements related to this event.
A Think & A Drink: Julie Mehretu
Friday, November 5, 7–10 pm
Enjoy guided tours of the exhibition, complimentary small bites, a cash bar, and conversation with fellow Walker members.