In a nondescript storage building behind an Okemos strip mall, artist Julie Mehretu sips tea from a Mason jar that’s identical to the jars she cleans her brushes in.
Six large paintings in various states of completion line the walls. In a far corner, two studio assistants are busy using an overhead projector to transfer architectural drawings onto one of the canvasses.
After a decade of showing her work in Houston, San Francisco, Berlin, Berkeley, New York, Spain, Germany and Denmark, Mehretu is back in the Lansing area on a “self-made sabbatical.”
Her year here is a homecoming of sorts, a chance to reconnect with family, for her 2-1/2-year-old son to get to know his grandparents.
During this “sabbatical,” Mehretu’s already received national recognition for an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts; shown work at Kresge Museum; lectured at Michigan State University (MSU) and prepared for upcoming international exhibits.
Mehretu’s sabbatical is hardly a time of rest, but she did pause recently to reflect on her East Lansing roots, her work and the future of the arts in Mid-Michigan.
MacArthur and the World
Mehretu moved from Ethiopia to East Lansing in 1977 when she was seven years old, so her father could pursue an Economic Geography appointment at Michigan State University.
“One of my high school teachers had us looking at the development of modern art and earlier, taking us to museums,” she says. “And the school was rigorous, with great classes in political science, math and literature. And that’s what informs making good art, not the art classes.”
As an art student at Kalamazoo College, her work was mostly representational. But during three years working as a waitress in New York City, her work became more abstract.
During that period, she enrolled in a graduate program at Rhode Island School of Design “to get access to the art world,” she says with a grin,“to get some different kinds of jobs.”
In 2005, Mehretu received a $500,000 MacArthur Fellows Program award. These “genius grants” are divvied up over a period of five years and support talented individuals in their creative pursuits.
Mehretu laughs self-consciously about the “genius” nickname, but knows the burden of the “genius” label is a small price to pay for the freedom afforded by the grant.
“It’s a life-changing phone call,” Mehretu says, recalling her grant notification. “The money is important, but it’s not just the money. It’s the affirmation of your work.”
“Without support for your work, it’s very difficult to make it,” she acknowledges.
“There are some very talented people I went to school with who are no longer making art because it’s just very difficult to make it. You have kids and life takes over.”
On the Creative Process
Mehretu’s style, which involves a complex layering approach, has been extensively analyzed in reviews. Mehretu contrasts her approach with some conceptual artists that direct the way the work will finish before they begin.
“I can’t work that way,” she observes. “I have to work in a way that the information comes together and I let that process happen in the studio. Through that process I have to dig into it in order to understand what I just did.”
For Mehretu, every piece is an act of discovery. Each work “evolves,” she says, “by allowing the ‘making’ to be and then trying to catch up. It’s like catching up with yourself. Any time I try to direct the work too much, I have a difficult time because the picture doesn’t work out.”
She notes that her work has gotten more complex.
“The works are getting very congested with marks,” she notes. “I’m layering all different kinds of architectural imagery together. But after that, I’ve started to sand it away, erase it. The gesture of the erasure, after the build-up, became the action I’m really interested in. Erasure is like an archeological dig into myself. Building it up and erasing it down and starting again—rather than completely wiping it away—so that information could inform the way the picture evolves.”
To Mehretu, this process is a metaphor for our collective cultural and political experience in the Middle East, where we cannot escape the consequences of past actions, causing the vestiges of those marks to stay with us.
“But I still have hope. Hope, in the absence of something,” she reflects, could be what her current interest in erasure is about. “It could be hope, it could be uncertainty and it could be just erasure.”
Exploration drives Mehretu’s work and she’s excited by “making something that comes from the investigation of who one is as an artist. I push for it to be as exciting to me as other work that I’m excited about. That’s always what inspires me.”
Lansing Area Art
Mehretu acknowledges that Lansing would be a good place to put down roots. She’s optimistic about the national attention the new Eli and Edythe Broad Museum and its architect Zaha Hadid, have already received, and what it means for the Mid-Michigan art community.
“It really put East Lansing on the map,” she notes. “If you have this museum bring in serious contemporary shows with national significance, you will have artists coming to this city.”
To retain young talent, she notes, “a lot will depend on the economy. We need more jobs in galleries and museums, doing design and installation work—jobs that pay decently, because artists need time to invest in their work.”
The area’s cheap housing and studio space are also attractive to artists.
But, as a person who has lived all over the world and loves to travel, Mehretu isn’t interested in putting down roots just yet.
Her Lansing sabbatical ends this summer. She’ll return to New York, but most of the paintings in progress at her Okemos studio will be shipped to New Orleans for a November show. One will be sent to Dublin for an August exhibit.
Then she moves to Berlin for two years to do a show at the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum in October 2009 and work on a permanent mural installation.
The prospect is beguiling: “Berlin has lots of cheap, large studio space, lots of artists that can work with us, and,”—her eyes light up— “it will be great to be so close to Paris, London, Greece, Istanbul—it’s inspiring, and that’s important to make the work.”
After that, she will return to New York and possibly—eventually—to the Lansing area.
Rick Ballard, a regular contributor to Capital Gains, lives in East Lansing.
Dave Trumpie is the managing photographer for Capital Gains. He is a freelance photographer and owner of Trumpie Photography.
Photos:
Julie Mehretu in her Okemos studio and her two assistants, Janel Schultz and Anthony Reach
All Photographs © Dave Trumpie