1. Julie Mehretu's father is Ethiopian and her mother is Jewish American.
23 Facts About Julie Mehretu
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Julie Mehretu was chosen for the CORE program at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, a residency that provided a studio, a stipend, and an exhibition at the museum.
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Julie Mehretu's canvases incorporate elements from technical drawings of various urban buildings and linear illustrations of urban efficiency, including city grids and weather charts.
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Julie Mehretu's drawings are similar to her paintings, with many layers forming complex, abstracted images of social interaction on a global scale.
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In Stadia I, II, and III Julie Mehretu conveys the cultural importance of the stadium through marks and layers of flat shape.
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Julie Mehretu was a resident of the CORE Program, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Artist-in-Residence Program at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
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Julie Mehretu is a member of the Artists Committee of Americans for the Arts.
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In 2000, Julie Mehretu was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.
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In 2013, Julie Mehretu was awarded the Barnett and Annalee Newman Award, and in 2015, she received the US Department of State Medal of Arts from Secretary of State John Kerry.
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Julie Mehretu is included in Times 100 Most Influential People of 2020.
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In 2016, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissioned Julie Mehretu to create a diptych, with each massive painting flanking the staircase in the atrium which is accessible and free to the public.
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In 2001, Julie Mehretu participated in the exhibition Painting at the Edge of the World at the Walker Art Center.
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Julie Mehretu has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including one at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson.
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Julie Mehretu's work has appeared in Freestyle exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem ; The Americans at the Barbican Gallery in London ; White Cube gallery in London, the Busan Biennale in Korea ; the 8th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius, Lithuania ; and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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Julie Mehretu's work was included in the "In Praise of Doubt" exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in the summer of 2011 as well as dOCUMENTA in Kassel in 2012.
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Julie Mehretu's work is included in Every Sound Is a Shape of Time, a 2024 collections-based exhibition organized by the Perez Art Museum Miami and curated by Franklin Sirmans, the museum director.
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Julie Mehretu's painting Untitled 1 sold for $1.02 million at Sotheby's in September 2010.
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In 2023, Michael Ovitz sold Julie Mehretu's Walkers With the Dawn and Morning for $10.7 million, setting a new record both for the artist herself and any artist born in Africa.
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Julie Mehretu subsequently wrote Haye demanding $17,500, and, after no offer of Mehretu pieces was made, he filed suit.
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In October 2023, Julie Mehretu broke the auction record for an African artist at Sotheby's Hong Kong, with her piece Untitled, which sold for $9.32 million.
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Julie Mehretu maintains a studio in Chelsea near the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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Julie Mehretu worked from an old arms factory in Berlin in 2007 and the former St Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem from 2016 to 2017.
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In October 2024, The Whitney Museum announced that Julie Mehretu had donated more than two million dollars to its "Free 25 and Under" program that provides free access to museum guests under the age of twenty-five.