Acclaimed abstract artist Julie Mehretu sat down with longtime friend Marcus Samuelsson in her light-filled Chelsea studio in Manhattan for an inspiring conversation about their Ethiopian roots, her journey to discovering her unique creative language, and how she continues to evolve her work.
Marcus Samuelsson: When I look at your work, it’s so distinct. In the beginning, how did you get clarity about ‘This is who I am as an artist’?
Julie Mehretu: That’s the core question: Who am I as an artist? For me, it wasn’t until graduate school that I started to unpack that. Why am I reluctant to work with figurative work? Why am I moving into this space of wanting to not be legible? What is interesting in that? How do I build a language within this? I knew I wanted to paint that way, but I didn’t understand how one does that—how one takes the marks and breaks them down into a language to make sense of them. Through that exploration, I could invent this thing that had a certain form of legibility or suggested or mimicked things like maps and space and migration patterns. The more I kept asking questions about what it was I was doing and then allowing intuition and freedom to guide certain things, I started to be able to add new elements into the work that would help prop up what was happening in these drawings. From that understanding, you arrive somewhere new and then how can you push that into this other new place?
An ink and acrylic on canvas mural at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York
MS: As Black creatives, it’s important to have a language that we always think about, so we can carve our own distinct [paths]. How did you create that line?
JM: People did that for me. I would start working on these drawings and the ones that were trying to do something, no one could get it. I started to work through these drawings that were coming to me when I was away from school and the pressure was off. When I came back to school, my colleagues said to me, ‘Those look like mines and those look like migration patterns.’ They saw this in the work. Then, it was this aspect of understanding creatively how much we have inside of ourselves and how much our heads can get in the way of what we’re trying to do. It’s a feeling. Either you get this, and it makes you think of these things, or it doesn’t. If it looks like an aerial map of a city, that’s what you might think, and somebody else would say, ‘It looks like a group of rioters,’ and another person would say, ‘It looks like a field of wheat.’ To me, it wasn’t about having the correct reading, it was about how do you experience this and how does it change you.
MS: You and I came up at the same time, and you showed [me] it’s possible to come to a city like New York and be original. When did you start thinking, ‘I do belong. I can do this now, and I can evolve.’
JM: To me, the time to stop doing it is if it’s not exciting and is not about an exploration and a deep drive and desire to keep pushing. Whenever I finish one group of paintings, ideas come to me about how to think about the next group and how I want to approach the next phase of something. They transform quite a lot in those shifts. For the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking about transparency. For example, with [Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)], I worked with [theater director] Peter Sellars, [composer] Tyshawn Sorey, and [choreographer] Reggie Gray, and it was all about transparent paintings and light, and the way these dancers’ bodies moved in and out of the space of the paintings. It was all integrated, and it taught me so much more about how I’m thinking about these kinds of transparent paintings.
Mehretu and Samuelsson hosted a cooking and conversation event for the Whitney Museum of American Art
MS: What are you looking forward to?
JM: I’m working on an exhibition for the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2024, which will look back at some of my earlier work. It won’t be installed in a time-based form. We’ll have a painting from 2009 next to a painting from last year. These works are different, but they’ll bring something out in each other. In that sense, I’m excited. I also want to bring some other artists into it—artists who have been important to me, who I’m going to have conversations with, as well as pieces that have been important to me.
MS: We’re both from Ethiopia. When you go back, what is that homecoming like?
JM: There’s so much I learn going back. First of all, the pride and light that Ethiopians showered me with is so humbling and moving. I was back there four or five years ago for [a symposium and a lecture at the University Art School] and so much had transpired in terms of contemporary art spaces, galleries, and artists who were pushing new forms of language. It was a palpable shift from when I was there eight years ago for the Julie Mehretu: The Addis Show at the Modern Art Museum Gebre Kristos Desta Center. It was a huge shift in terms of what, visually, was happening and the kind of  imagination, investment, and instruction that were taking place at the art school.
MS: [Ethiopia] is very traditional in its music and art. But you’re a light. If they see you do it, they also can see themselves doing it. When I go back to cook, I always think about that.
JM: Before the revolution [in 1974], Ethiopia was one of the leading countries on the continent regarding inventions in architecture, art, painting, and music. These were part of the visionary, avant-garde modernists of the continent. It’s so sad what happened to much of that energy after the revolution. That ambition and creativity was shut down and stymied. Now, Ethiopia has so much to catch up to compared to other African countries. But it’s on its way. Ethiopians come from such rich varieties of cultures and are tenaciously creative and determined. It’s inspiring.
This article originally appeared in HD’s November 2022 issue.
