Introduction

Narrator: Welcome to Julie Mehretu, the first retrospective of the artist’s work in New York. The exhibition opens with one of her early works, Transcending: The New International. It’s the large painting opposite the elevators.                           

Rujeko Hockley: As a viewer, when you stand in front of one of her paintings, you are really kind of enveloped by all that she has done. And that is true, whether they're 20 feet wide—or if they're really intimate drawings.

Narrator: Rujeko Hockley is a curator at the Whitney. 

Rujeko Hockley: They are really seductive in a certain way: the intricacy of the details, the kind of embedded nature of the different layers. That layering is really emblematic of her practice, but also of her approach and the way that we might think about what it means to be an artist at this time.

She is an artist who has really pushed the boundaries of painting, of contemporary art in general, of destabilizing categories around who an American artist is, what is American art? What does it mean to be of the global African Diaspora?    

Narrator: In this painting, Mehretu layers maps and architectural drawings from African capitals, focusing especially on sites and building styles that emerged from independence movements. One important element is a map of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. The artist was born there in 1970 and lived in the city until 1977, when her family came to the United States to escape political turmoil. As you look closely, you’ll also see many marks that don’t seem to represent anything specific. These smaller abstract forms and flows move across the surface. They seem to suggest migration through a complex, abstracted political landscape. Mehretu called these dynamic marks “characters.” She’d been working with them for a while by the time she had made this painting. We’ll look more closely at some of them in the next stop on our tour, which continues into the gallery to the left.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions, out of Creative Commons.