“I wanted to bring my drawing into time and place.”- Julie Mehretu. Indeed, much of Julie’s work depicts layers of history and intentions. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, Julie and her family fled the country in 1977 to escape political turmoil and moved to Michigan. She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a Master’s degree in fine arts. She is known for her larger abstract paintings, which is a comment upon the transition of history and the post-war world, containing layers of architectural imageries on whose surface she makes spontaneous, gestural marks. Mehretu is inspired by a multitude of sources, including archival photographs, urban-planning grids, comics, Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, graffiti, and modernist art and architecture. Her work explores the interaction between and culmination of personal and communal identities.
