I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency. The characters in my maps plotted, journeyed, evolved, and built civilizations. I charted, analyzed, and mapped their experience and development: their cities, their suburbs, their conflicts, and their wars. The paintings occurred in an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space. As I continued to work I needed a context for the marks, the characters. By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings I tried to create a metaphoric,
tectonic view of structural history. I wanted to bring my drawing into time and place. At first the paintings were just black ink drawing on a neutral ground. Although the mark making is abstract and gestural, I think of it as actually behaving and happening. The marks signify characters that socialize. So the drawings perform a narrative, one that unfolds as I draw. I think of the
architecture and geometry as part of a superstructure: history, time and space fused into one super context for the narrative. Personally I find interesting to deal with these issues in painting and abstraction. Painting has such a long and dense history of language to pull from and respond to. It has been
questioned, dumped on, re-challenged, re-invented, and killed so many times. In some ways the burden of painting has actually morphed into its attribute. I have been able to redefine painting as a political language for my project.
— Julie Mehretu

Selected solo exhibitions: 2003: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; 2002: White Cube, London; 2001: The Project, New York; Art Pace, San Antonio, USA.
Selected group exhibitions: 2003: 8th Istanbul Biennial; The Moderns, Castello di Rivoli, Turin; GPS, Palais du Tokyo, Paris; International Exhibition, Athens; Splat Boom Pow!, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora, National Museum for African Art, Washington; Metascape, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Social Strategies: Redefining Social Realism, University of Californa, Santa Barbara; 2002: Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Out of Site, New Museum, New York; The 8th Baltic Triennial of International Art, Vilnius; Busan Biennale, Korea; Terra Incognita: Contemporary Artists, Contemporary Arts Museum, St. Louis, USA; 2001: Urgent Painting, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; The Americans, Barbican Art Centre, London; Painting at the Edge of the World, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; Casino 2001, Stedelijk Museum, Gent.