MEHRETU: East Lansing Artist Becomes International Sensation

 

This article will soon appear in the Lansing Sate Jounrnal.  You get a sneak preview

One sure way of rating the health and success of a city, is to see what its children, now adults, have accomplished who were raised there. 

Well, in the case of the greater Lansing area, the kids have done very well, thank you.  Here’s a small sampling of some of the standouts who have achieved national and international recognition, along with where they graduated from high school. It’s quite an impressive list.

·      Larry Page, co-creator of Google, East Lansing High School

·      Magic Johnson, basketball superstar and business leader, Everett High school.

·      Lisa Kron, Tony-award winning Broadway writer and performer, Everett High School.

·      Nate Silver, pollster and statistician guru who is constantly quoted by media throughout the US. East Lansing High School.

·      Julie Mehretu, world renown visual artist who was listed in TIME magazine’s most influential 100. East Lansing High School  

Is there something about the environment and culture of mid-Michigan that nurtures world class success in our children? We will attempt to find out.

Let’s begin with Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu

As my Zoom screen flickered to life, Julie Mehretu’s image appeared.  A fresh, lively face, a full crop of curly – almost unruly- hair, with a big easy smile.  Nearing 50, Julie is vibrant, full of energy and shows no pretentions despite her dazzling career.

Today Mehretu (MER-ra-tu) is a one of the brightest shining stars in the art world.  The financial giant Goldman Sachs built a flashy new building in Manhattan in 2010 and they chose Mehretu to paint a mural (called “Mural”) to occupy the lobby.  It is 80 feet long and 23 feet high and they paid her $5 million.

Only two years before that commission, one of her abstract works sold for $4.8 million in auction.

 In 2005, Mehretu won the coveted $500,000 MacArthur “genius” award.  The MacArthur folks described her work this way:

 “Creating dazzling, layered pictorial planes of geometric abstraction, iconic imagery and figurative markings that transform canvasses into visually compelling excavations of multiple epochs and locales.”

 She now has a mid-career retrospective traveling exhibit that made a stop in Los Angeles and will be visiting several other US cities. 

 Mehretu is truly an artist for our age. Julie is biracial and proudly gay with a family. Her work is bold, colorful, accessible, and exudes energy. She uses computers, photography, and other cutting age techniques to create her images and world political events provide the context.

 An East Lansing gallery owner, Roy Saper, says “Besides her compelling body of work, what sets her apart is her ability to talk expansively about how she does her work, which is always interesting.  Many artists don’t have those communication skills. People want to know how an artist works.”

 But when she was a student at East Lansing High School, she was not seen as the trailblazer she is now. 

 Pat Rist, her art teacher at the high school said, “Julie was a wonderful person and was a talented artist, as were five or six other students in class at the time.  She had a lovely personality and was easy to work with, but I never saw her as a genius of any kind. Julie didn’t stand out.”

 But when Rist attended Mehretu’s solo exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2007, she said “It brought tears to my eyes. I saw a lot of exciting concepts in her art, but nothing that I taught her.  Our Studio Art class never went that far.”

 Mehretu values what she received in Rist’s art classes. “She took us regularly to museums and had us compete in those art exhibitions in Lansing.  She was very encouraging.  When we went to the Kresge Art Museum she had curators speak to us about certain artists – which made me go back to school and try to make paintings like them.”

 Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970 and came to East Lansing in 1977 when her father, Assefa, became a professor of Economic Geography at Michigan State University.  Her American mother (Doree) was a teacher at the Radmoor Montessori School on Mt. Hope in Okemos.

 Now living in New York, she loved growing up in East Lansing and felt that it was a major influence on her life as an artist.

 “I go back to East Lansing often.  I am always struck with the landscape – the flat farms and big sky.  We lived in the flowerpot area (off of Harrison Rd) on Daisy Lane.

 “It was a great neighborhood.  I grew up with my siblings (a sister and brother) and friends, and the neighborhood was ours! We rode our bikes everywhere and we colonized the woods in back of the houses.  This was our area!”

 Mehretu remembers the expansive freedom of that time and traveling around on bikes, cheap cars and CATA buses.

 While in Ethiopia, Julie and her family spoke English together, so there was no language barrier in Michigan.  “I was struck by the multi culturalism of my world. My father was involved in the MSU Africa Center and I was always surrounded by African dance parties in the neighborhood, community gatherings and feasts.  The neighborhood was filled with these old hippies.”

 As she grew older, she had a group of school pals that dominated her life.  “I had an amazing group of brilliant friends who were really creative people – musicians, artists, really strong thinkers and interesting folks. We did everything together.  We were a band of outsiders in a way, but we weren’t bad, although we tried to be bad.  We were too careful.  We were really nerdy!”

 Aaron Singer, now a lawyer in New Haven, Connecticut, was in that group of friends. “Julie was very levelheaded and self-assured. The group was nerdy and intellectual, and now they are doctors, lawyers and artists who live all over the country.

 “She was smart in all things.  When Julie was there you were assured of having a good time.  But I would have never picked her out of the group as the one to achieve this level of success.” 

 Mehretu looks back at her early life in East Lansing and feels that the university and land grant ethos of the place made for a community of rich ideas and activities.  That background informed her as an artist.

 After high school, Mehretu became an art major at Kalamazoo College.  She was searching for an art form that suited her and she gravitated to contemporary art.

 “I always wanted to be an artist, I took art classes because that was the area where I felt most capable, most excited and most alive.  But growing up in East Lansing at the time had very little to do with contemporary art exposure.  

 “I wasn’t able to see how I could make my living as an artist.  Now you have the Broad Museum and other institutions, but back then I read contemporary art journals to learn about it.  The only thing that was available to me locally was the Kresge Museum at MSU and the Saper Gallery.  My family also took me to the DIA in Detroit and the Art Institute in Chicago.”

 Mehretu thrived in the liberal arts atmosphere of Kalamazoo College. She took classes in many different areas, like economics and theology, and credits the college for giving her an intense work ethic as well as technical art skills such as how to paint, how to think about painting and drawing, and ceramics – and a lot of encouragement from great teachers.

 After K College, the young artist lived in New York, waitressing during the day and painting at night, but soon won a full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design.  She says, “It was there that I started to move into videos, film photography and printmaking.  I found my voice in Rhode Island.”

 Monica Ramirez-Montague, the new Executive Director of MSU’s Broad Museum says, “She’s way up there in the art world.

 “I’ve been following Julie’s art for many years.  It’s very dynamic. I have a background in architecture and many of her works feature architectural images. Many of her murals are like explosions – they’re filled with velocity and speed. She has the vocabulary of our time. And I certainly think she will be in art history books in years to come.” 

 When Time Magazine chose her for their 100 Most Influential People of 2020, they devoted one full page to Mehretu. 

 The works that have brought her the most fame and fortune are her large-scale pieces. And she uses a team of artisans to construct them.

 And these large works are layered with many different images and shapes which have become her trademark. And again, back to her East Lansing days, Mehretu played violin in high school which also plays a critical role in her creative palette.

 “Step by step, layer by layer, I started to do more and more with the question that I was trying to answer. Music is especially important.  I think there is a visceral experience in my paintings that feels musical.  I listen to all kinds of music when I do my art.  It’s like when someone composes a symphony and has many different instruments, or an opera that has many different components.  I think of these paintings operate on all of these different levels and they feel like they have this operatic or symphonic dynamic to them.”

 Discussing her groundbreaking Goldman Sachs “Mural” she says, “I had a team of 30 people working on that.  I was in Berlin at the time and was against a strong deadline with the opening of the building.  We had two teams working day and night. It was exciting and nerve wracking”

 You can find many compelling YouTube videos of the creative process of the work.

 “It was the biggest symphonic painting I had done up until that time.  It was everything I had been working on in the 10-12 years before and became this huge arc of what I was working with –  architecture, color, geometric shapes and the mask lines, the free hand and the tiny marks with the pens and the looser gestures with the brush.”

 

It took her two years to create the “Mural” and then the hard part comes – she had to ship the work away to its new owner.  “I miss my paintings when they’re gone.  I have lived with them for a long time and I’m sad when they clear away.  There’s always this pause between the next group of work and in between the white walls are blank. It’s a big loss.”

 In the case of “Mural”, Goldman Sachs built a glass wall opposite the 80-foot work so people on the street can appreciate it as well as those inside.  Public and private art together.

 Fortunate for Julie Mehretu, those vacant white walls are not empty for long.  Museums and individual collectors are eager to buy her works.  Last year she estimated that she created 12-13 paintings for a show, and now she’s working 8-10 more.

 Here is a site that displays her latest show in New York: https://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/julie-mehretu-new-york-about-the-space-of-half-an-hour/

 And if you’re patient, when gazing at her paintings, you may be able to see the streets, byways, and neighborhoods of East Lansing hidden in her dynamic abstracts.

Please check out the internet to see a full display of Mehretu's groundbreaking painting, as well as videos of interviews and an inside look at the creation of her works.