Being Higher I, 2013, and Being Higher II, 2013

Julie Mehretu: These are two paintings that I made during Hurricane Sandy, when my studio was shut down in the building that I'm in. It was flooded and the elevators weren't working. They had to close the building down for a while. I took these two paintings home. I was able to work on them at home, in my studio at the house. 

And I didn't have anything on them. They were just prepared surfaces of this very papery surface where you can't fully erase a mark. It kind of stains the surface [because] it's a porous surface that has a lot of silica and pumice in it, so it works much more like paper. So when you put ink down, it absorbs it.

Narrator: Working at home through the hurricane meant that the paintings’ scale inevitably related to the body. Mehretu’s friend, the artist Glenn Ligon, described this new intimacy in the work. He wrote: “Her move away from marks that represent a collection of individuals to ones that reference the sweep of an individual’s hand or the scale of her body signals a new focus on the role each of us play in helping imagine a new world.”