Julie Mehretu: City Sitings
August 17–November 30, 2008
Ticketed

Julie Mehretu: City Sitings brings this internationally acclaimed artist’s work to the NCMA for the first time. 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. Such diverse stylistic references correlate with contemporary urban and transnational realities, including the artist’s own mixed heritage as Ethiopian-American and her itinerant life history.

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. 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.

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