Julie Mehretu, Charioteer, 2007
Ink and acrylic on linen, 60 x 84 in. Collection of Nicolas Rohatyn and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, N.Y. © 2007 Julie Mehretu, Courtesy The Project, PHOTO: Steven Gerlich

Julie Mehretu: City Sitings brings together nine monumental paintings by this renowned contemporary artist. Inspired by cities, Mehretu employs a dynamic visual vocabulary in her intricately layered canvases combining maps, logos, urban grids, and architectural renderings. Mehretu’s paintings explore timely issues of migration, globalization, conflict, and social action using the urban landscape as the setting. Her multifaceted canvases engage viewers in a new vision of their own urban landscape. Don’t miss this internationally celebrated artist’s first exhibition in the Southeast.

This exhibition is organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts in collaboration with Julie Mehretu. Support has been provided through generous grants from the Joyce Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

This exhibition is also made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.

• Gallery guides are available in the exhibition gallery.
• Large-print and Spanish label copy is available in the exhibition gallery.
• A fully-illustrated exhibition catalogue is for sale in the Museum Store. There are also several exhibition-related books for sale.

• Zoom in to explore the paintings, find details and submit your own observations.
• Be sure to check construction updates to help you better plan your visit.
• No photography, food, or beverage is permitted in the gallery.

Cities fascinate artist Julie Mehretu.

Her paintings are multilayered, intricate—often huge—and explore how we humans socialize and take action in cities that have been designed to structure our daily experience.

Because of their sheer scale, many of Mehretu’s paintings invite us to travel through them, to lose ourselves in their depths, to discover them in much the same way we might explore the space of a city.

“My aim,” says Mehretu, “is to have a picture that appears one way from a distance—almost like 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.”

Julie Mehretu: City Sitings brings this internationally acclaimed artist’s work to the NCMA for the first time and provides a rare opportunity to see multiple works in her first showing in North Carolina. The exhibition features some of her most monumental paintings—many of which were created just for this show—that address contemporary themes of place, power, (post)colonialism, and globalization with dramatic flair.

In her expansive canvases, Mehretu draws on a dynamic array of popular imagery accessible to diverse audiences—maps, urban grids, graffiti, calligraphy—and configures these into an unanticipated, irresistible personal visual vocabulary. Mehretu’s compelling works reenvision the urban experience and rewrite narratives of exclusion, reconciling divergent histories through her expansive, dynamic compositions. Inspired by community action, historical events, and the built environment, she engages viewers in a new vision of the metropolitan landscape.

Read more: Meet the Artist: An Interview with Julie Mehretu

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to an Ethiopian father and American mother, Julie Mehretu (American, born 1970) immigrated to the United States at the age of seven and grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. She graduated from Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1992, after having spent a year abroad in Dakar, Senegal, and completed a master of fine arts degree at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1997. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

Mehretu’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States, including the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and worldwide in England, Belgium, Korea, Italy, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere.

Her work toured Europe in a solo exhibition organized by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain, in 2006. As her reputation has expanded, so, too, have her extensive travels; she represented the United States at the 2006 Contemporary Art Biennale of Sydney in Australia, and she will begin a two-year residency in Berlin in fall 2008.

These and other diverse international experiences inform her work in which cities are sites to examine issues of mobility, dislocation, empowerment, and competition in global economies. Truly a citizen of the world, she widely adapts diverse images from architecture, urban planning, hip-hop culture, and mass media, rendering such themes both relevant and widely accessible to audiences worldwide and close to home.