Artiste Extraordinaire - Julie Mehretu

About 20 years ago while an exchange student in Dakar, I was housemates with Julie Mehretu. We lived in a group house of 10 American college students near the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop.  The 5-bedroom large house had barely any furniture. In the shared double bedrooms, we each had an armoire and slept on foam mattresses on the floor, and our living room had floor mats that were rolled out for daily lunches around a bowl of ceeb u jen (fish with rice).  The house at that time - the early 90's - was filled (no overflowing!) with the identity politics of our diverse group of politically-aware, young, smart activists living in West Africa that included gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight, white, black, bi-racial, multi-cultural, multinational.  All 10 of us, each holding some combination of these labels and associated fraught meanings - and for lack of a better label of my more complex self, I suppose I was the token white, straight girl born of two American parents.  Sometimes I describe that time as the pilot for MTV's Real World Dakar.  There was certainly the drama, the angst, the in-fighting, the affairs, and the alliances.

I recall Julie as funky, creative, temperamental, opinionated, passionate, radical, and brilliant.  While not in her artist identity at that time, she certainly often sketched in notebooks.  Daughter of a white American mother and a Ethiopian political refugee father, Julie had moved to Michigan in childhood, but had family still in Ethiopia.  Her aunt, a flight attendant for Ethiopian Airlines would occasionally bring platters of grandmother's homemade, truly authentic, made with love, doro wat  to the house, on her Addis -Dakar route.

After that year, the tensions of the house meant we did not keep in touch, though I ran into her a few times on the #1 subway when we both lived in New York in the mid/late 90's,  Finally over ourselves, our catch-up conversations were excited and warm.  She was embarking on an art career with some early success, and had begun dating her partner (and now spouse), Jessica (a white Australian, which, given the polarized identity politics of our group house, was notable).  We are now Facebook friends (or really acquaintances, though we had again some nice catch-up emails through social networking).  I won't claim more - but admittedly, I'm pretty psyched to even be within a outer orbit of this highly successful artist, to watch her success.  And her success, her art and her life's path - as well as my own - very much explain who we are and who we were, and from where and how we have become the people we are today.

And I'm pretty sure, even without this association, I would love, love, love her art.  A few year's ago, Julie's steep upward trajectory in  the art world came to my attention when the Smithsonian Museum of African Art had an exhibit of Ethiopia and the Diaspora, featuring both an installation piece and paintings by Julie.  It was at that time, I learned that she had shown in the Whitney Biennial.  Later that fall, she won a MacArthur "genius" award.  When the new building of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA - my fave) opened in NYC, I went to check it out, and saw a massive Mehretu canvas, hanging in a prominent gallery doorway, purchased through the museum's 21st Century Fund.  Mark me impressed - no, make that in awe.

Julie's works are large abstract canvases are layered with back and white drafting marks, and overlay with color blocks of curls and swirls, and angular geometric forms.  The detailed, painstaking work of the drafting is so unusual in modern art.  The layers add meaning and depth that I can only begin to consider the significance.  The paintings are full of motion - highly energetic, dynamic, and kinetic.  They suggest orbits, systems, planets, depth,and complex systems - I suppose each depending on the paintings context as suggested in its title.

Recently, Julie was commissioned to do a humongous (this truly is the best word choice) mural for the new Goldman Sachs lobby in New York.  The recent New Yorker article describes it below (emphasis added):

Eighty feet long by twenty-three feet high, Julie Mehretu’s “Mural” dominates the entrance lobby of Goldman Sachs’s new steel-and-glass office building in lower Manhattan. Hundreds of precisely defined abstract shapes in saturated colors—small dots and squares, straight and curving lines, larger geometric or free-form shapes ranging from several inches to several feet in length—move across it in an oceanic sweep.

The fact that it is visible from the street through the glass and steel wall, as well as to all employees and visitors passing through he GS lobby make it semi-public art, and for that I am even more impressed. 

A few year ago, as I watched her grow - and fantasized about one day being an art collector of "undiscovered," emerging contemporary artists (perhaps even of Africa and the diaspora) -  I inquired at her representing gallery if there were any pieces for sale (there weren't - even at that time she was pre-selling on commission), and the price range (at that time, I think, upwards of $5,000- $10,000, now much, much more).  Out of my league. After reading the New Yorker piece, however, I did, however, treat myself to a limited edition Julie Mehertu lithograph print, "Stadia," created as part of the 2010 official art poster series for the FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa.