Julie Mehretu / MATRIX 211
Interview with Julie Mehretu
Currently on view in the MATRIX Gallery, Manifestation features new drawings and paintings by New York–based artist Julie Mehretu. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Mehretu attended university in Dakar, Senegal, obtained her B.A. from Kalamazoo College in Michigan, and took her M.F.A. in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. The following is an excerpt from "Looking Back," an e-mail interview between Mehretu and Olukemi Ilesanmi, assistant curator, Walker Art Center, conducted in April 2003, following Mehretu’s residency at the Walker.
Olukemi Ilesanmi: Your work often seems to be in conversation across art-historical time, combining the dynamism of the Futurists, geometric abstraction of Malevich, historical impulse of Delacroix or Goya, and enveloping scale of color-field painting, yet to these you add new narratives, social critiques, and suggestions of personal biography. How did this all come to be?
Julie Mehretu: 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....My fascination was with the numerous conflicting stories, histories, and disparate cultures that, through time and place, came together to make me....
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 mark-making 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....
OI: It seems that the conceptual layers in your work are echoed by the physical layers you create in the paintings themselves.
JM: The layering process in my work really developed with the investigation of the characters. At first, the paintings were just composed of layers of drawing. There were a few characters that huddled together and created a community. As they migrated and mixed with other characters, they made new cities. Eventually, a whole terrain would be drawn upon and entangled with a narrative....
As the work developed, the language of mapmaking, specific architectural plans, and then eventually the symbolic sampling of visual traditions in art history slipped into the layers of the paintings. Different types of visual language symbolized and referenced various social and political ideas and attitudes....
The underlying conceptual framework of my paintings lies in the relationship between the individual and the community, the whole. Each mark represents individual agency, an active social character. My aim is to have a picture that appears one way from a distance—almost like looking at a cosmology, city, or universe from afar—but then when you approach the work, the overall image shatters into numerous other pictures, stories, and events....
OI: Why do you focus on these built environments that seem to have a social agenda—stadiums, city squares, airports?
JM: I am interested in the larger metaphoric potential of these types of places....While I think of the paintings as originating here—being very grounded in this world and based on the cities, monuments, systems, and infrastructures that we have built—I do like to think of them as being narrative maps without a specific place or location. I am interested in ways to picture and map our relationships and interactions within this constructed world.
First published in the exhibition catalog Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2003). Reprinted with permission.
The MATRIX Program at the UC Berkeley Art Museum is made possible by the generous endowment gift of Phyllis C. Wattis.
Additional donors to the MATRIX Program include the UAM Council MATRIX Endowment, Ann M. Hatch, Art Berliner, Christopher Vroom and Illya Szilak, Eric McDougall, and Glenn and April Bucksbaum.
Special support for Julie Mehretu/MATRIX 211 Manifestation has been provided by Wanda Kownacki and John Holton, Roselyne C. Swig, and Joan Roebuck.
