Julie Mehretu (born Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1970) is an African American artist best known for her densely-layered abstract paintings and prints. Raised in Michigan, Mehretu was educated at the University Cheik Anta Diop (UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal, Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1997. She now lives and works in New York City. Mehretu’s shares her New York studio with her partner, also a celebrated artist, Jessica Rankin. Mehretu is represented by Christian Haye of The Project gallery in New York Cityand shows work with Jay Jopling at the White Cube art gallery in London.

Mehretu’s work incorporates the visual vocabulary of maps, urban-planning grids, and architectural forms as it alternates between historical narratives and fictional landscapes. One of the artists featured in the Walker Art Center’s 2001 exhibition Painting at the Edge of the World, Mehretu creates paintings that combine abstract forms with the familiar, such as the Roman Coliseum and floor plans from international airports. This exhibition features nine newly commissioned, large-scale paintings and concludes her yearlong artist residency at the Walker Art Center.

Mehretu combines a personal language of signs and symbols with architectural imagery to create her elaborate paintings. Simultaneously engaged with the formal concerns of color and line and the social concerns of power, history, globalism, and personal narrative, she is interested in “the multifaceted layers of place, space, and time that impact the formation of personal and communal identity.” The underlying structure of her work consists of socially charged public spaces–government buildings, museums, stadiums, schools, and airports–drawn in the form of maps and diagrams. She inscribes her own narrative into these spaces through the layering of personal markings. Mehretu achieves an effect of compositional maelstrom, as elements advance and recede within the graphically ambiguous spaces.

Mehretu was the recipient of the 2001 Penny McCall Award. Her work has been included in Greater New York, P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, New York (2000), and she has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including one at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2000). More recently, her work has appeared in Free Style at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001); The Americans at the Barbican Gallery in London (2001)[citation needed]; White Cube gallery in London (2002), the Busan Biennale in Korea (2002); the 8th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius, Lithuania (2002); and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (2002) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

On September 20, 2005, she was named as one of the 2005 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the “genius grant.”