Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu is an Ethiopian-American contemporary artist born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She is best known for her large-scale abstract paintings, which are composed of intricate layers of geometric forms, calligraphic marks, and text. In her works, she often combines elements of architecture, landscape, and cartography to explore the complexities of history and power. Mehretu attended Addis Ababa University for two years before moving to the United States in 1992. She studied at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, and then moved to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1997. She then moved to New York City, where she received her Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000. Mehretu’s work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2020, she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2021 she was awarded the National Medal of