MUSEUMS: A Closer Look at Julie Mehretu’s ‘Epigraph, Damascus’
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
02.10.2020
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“If we think about periods of civil unrest, of protest, of war; of destruction of architecture, of communities, of lives, we think not only about the images of that, but also of the fear, the terror, the anxiety, the violence, the bodies moving in space. And so what we have in Epigraph, Damascus is not only fragments of the city, through these architectural remnants and pieces that we see on the surface. But also a sort of incoherence, instability, cacophony that’s conveyed in the brushmarks and through the layers on top. ” — Christine Kim on Julie Mehretu
While in Los Angeles for the fairs, a must-see show will be Julie Mehretu’s mid-career survey at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, on view until March 22, 2020. As part of our Black History Month programming, we are highlighting this video from LACMA, with curator Christine Kim talking about the impact of Mehretu’s epic print Epigraph, Damascus (2016), and Mehretu giving a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creating the work.
From LACMA:
The first-ever comprehensive retrospective of Mehretu’s career, it covers over two decades of her examination of history, colonialism, capitalism, geopolitics, war, global uprising, diaspora, and displacement through the artistic strategies of abstraction, architecture, landscape, movement, and, most recently, figuration. Mehretu’s play with scale, as evident in her intimate drawings and large canvases and complex techniques in printmaking, will be explored in depth. Mehretu received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and, among many awards and honors, is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” (2005) and a U.S. State Department National Medal of Arts (2015).
