Julie Mehretu exhibit at DIA

[JemChi]

Stadia II, 2004, ink and acrylic on canvas. Collection Carneigie Museum of Art Courtesy The Project and the artist


DETROIT — With the grand reopening of the Detroit Institute of the Arts this month, Detroit triumphantly restores its cultural centerpiece to the art world. One of the premiere gallery exhibits is a series of paintings created by a young, talented and visionary artist whose presence in Detroit is also somewhat of a successful return.

Julie Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia but she spent the majority of her formative years in Michigan. Growing up in East Lansing, Mehretu remembers visiting the DIA and the Jazzfest when her father would have to take care of immigration formalities in Detroit.

She received her Bachelor of Fine Art at Kalamazoo College before studying at the Cheik Anta Diop University in Senegal and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Mehretu’s paintings explore the building up and tearing down of societies over large periods of time and what gets left behind. It’s a close look at the social experiments that occur within the world’s most densely populated areas as they rise and fall; a collage of faint architectural renderings set against modern, abstract brushstrokes.

Mehretu’s work is now being exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world.

Mehretu completed five paintings in 2007 specifically for the exhibition at the DIA. She sat down for a brief interview with the Michigan Citizen at the DIA this week, amidst the frantic pre-gala preparations, to discuss Detroit as a perfect venue for this exhibition and the influence hip-hop has on her method.

Michigan Citizen: Detroit is a city struggling to endure a somewhat painful change in identity. Do you think your work addresses the kinds of changes going on in the modern American city?

Julie Mehretu: I’m fascinated by cities as places that are needed — whether it’s in a war context or they’re needed for safety, or the economic reasons for the development of the city. You can basically obtain a political history from how they’ve evolved and developed—then they tend to have a great climax and then break down and regenerate. These are all ideas I’m interested in because of what they say — they provide a portrait, or picture. They can be very telling, politically and socially.

I think Detroit is fascinating and resonates. And in many ways is a great context for the work, but also it’s brought out a lot of new stuff. I just lived in Berlin and Berlin is another city that has just gone through these major changes. So the erasure of space, the historic building of colossal, important buildings like the train station and then the complete breakdown — you go there now and its just abandoned.

MC: Berlin and Detroit share the honor of being part of the ‘Shrinking Cities’ exhibition- has that movement affected your work?

JM: That’s exactly the phenomenon that I’m interested in – in the work architecture plays this important role for me because it’s a metaphor for political time, or the social time. It works as a representation for a certain type of thinking. A lot of those new paintings are basically ‘erased’ paintings — they have a lot of erasure in them. These big structures are built up, some kind of document of time, and social thought, and this erasure of that, in some ways, allows for something else to happen. That’s something I want to investigate more in the new work.

MC: One of the things that struck me about your work is that it’s political but the message isn’t necessarily thrown at you. Do you feel it’s important for an artist to make that kind of statement which stems from the socio-political realm?

JM: The work that I’m most interested in tends to be work that has some kind of social engagement. Not that it has to be overtly political — it can be political in many different ways. I can be attracted to certain types of paintings that are beautiful — object-making that’s made for pure lusciousness. But I like to learn something. I’m more interested in the subtle complexities of asking questions, even if it’s just a humanist question.

MC: Your work definitely addresses the pursuit of beauty, as well, while pushing the boundaries of traditional aesthetic barriers.

JM: For me it’s intentional to work using non-representational language. An image is so much what that image is — it’s hard to say, a person is a bird, but you can do that in abstraction. For me it’s that complexity that it isn’t just necessarily one picture, but it can be these other pictures as well.

MC: What else in the current art community influences your process?

JM: I listen to a lot of music when I’m creating. Hip hop is what I grew up on — it’s been really informative — but also jazz, soul, all kinds of stuff. Rarely am I working without music. I wouldn’t be able to make this work without music. It’s similar to what I’m doing in terms of sampling things from other visual sources and incorporating them into this image, so it’s like this mix of all this type of historical language.

Julie Mehretu’s ‘City Sitings’ exhibit will inaugurate the Central Special Exhibition Gallery in the Detroit Institute of Arts from November 23,2007 to March 30, 2008.