Julie Mehretu attended the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal, before moving to the United States, where she earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. A residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis was followed by her seminal solo show Drawing into Painting at the same institution in 2004. In 2005 she was one of 25 recipients of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, commonly referred to as a ‘genius grant’.

Mehretu’s work can be seen in the currently touring Africa Remix. Other recent group exhibitions include the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo biennials, and the 2003 biennials of Istanbul and Prague; Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora at the National Museum for African Art in Washington, DC (2003); Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2001); and the 2000 edition of Greater New York at PS1.

Mehretu has developed a distinctive visual language that maps interactions and relationships within our constructed world. Her drawings, paintings and prints encapsulate the frenetic and fragmented energy of cities, buildings and structures through layered mark-making in patterns recalling explosive and centrifugal forces. Mehretu started working on these three prints, which comprise the Heavy Weather series, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit the American Gulf Coast, and her visual idiom adroitly conveys the devastating powers of nature as experienced in New Orleans.

In an interview by Olukemi Ilesanmi, published in the catalogue of Drawing into Painting, Mehretu relates how her personal as well as public histories underpin her work:

One of the first points of departure in making my work was an investigation of who I am as an artist: what are the foundations of what I am interested in; what am I really trying to make work about? It developed into a “self-ethnographic” project for which I began to dissect my lineage and ancestry in an effort to further understand the formation of my own identity. I tried to approach this process somewhat analytically by systematically organizing and collecting stories and photographs of my family, reviewing family genealogies, delineating their separate geographies, and stitching it all together in an archive of resources. My fascination was with the numerous conflicting stories, histories, and disparate cultures that, through time and place, came together to make me.

I didn’t want to use that material specifically in my paintings – my work was much more gestural and abstract. Through the process of reexamining and challenging my paintings, I arrived at the question of how to link my interest in the formation of social identity with my work. I began to look at my marking lexicon as signifiers of social agency, as individual characters. As the work grew, it developed cities, histories, wars, and geographies, evolving to incorporate the visual languages of maps, charts, architectural renderings, and aspects of popular culture. It has become a personal, semibiographical “thought experiment” of my experience and a response to the social space I inhabit and challenge.(1)

(1)‘Looking Back: E-mail interview between Julie Mehretu and Olukemi Ilesanmi, April 2003’ in Fogle, Douglas and Olukemi Ilesanmi (eds), Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 11.

---