| Julie Mehretu: City Sitings brings together 12 of the artist’s monumental paintings inspired by community, history, and the built environment. Mehretu’s compelling canvases re-envision urban experience, and rewrite narratives of exclusion, reconciling divergent histories through her expansive, dynamic compositions. Mehretu’s work evokes highly personalized, yet distinctly universal themes that draw on her experiences as a citizen of the world and of the city. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in Michigan and now a resident of New York City, she employs a dynamic visual vocabulary that combines maps, urban grids, and architectural renderings to articulate complex social and geopolitical structures. The immense proportions, organic layering, and careful detail convey the complexities of the urban environment. |
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Williams College Museum of Art
Courtesy of the artist.
Julie Mehretu: City Sitings brings together 12 of the artist’s monumental paintings inspired by community, history, and the built environment. Mehretu’s compelling canvases re-envision urban experience, and rewrite narratives of exclusion, reconciling divergent histories through her expansive, dynamic compositions. Mehretu’s work evokes highly personalized, yet distinctly universal themes that draw on her experiences as a citizen of the world and of the city. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in Michigan and now a resident of New York City, she employs a dynamic visual vocabulary that combines maps, urban grids, and architectural renderings to articulate complex social and geopolitical structures. The immense proportions, organic layering, and careful detail convey the complexities of the urban environment. Mehretu queries what impact an individual can have, and what one person contributes to the construction of a larger narrative. The interplay between the individual and larger community finds form in the compositional structure of Mehretu’s canvases. One must experience them both up close and from a distance to activate the dynamics of local empowerment within a more sweeping story.
