Art Assignment - Julie Mehretu b. 1970 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Art Assignment

Form & Content: Julie Mehretu's Mural

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Julie Mehretu b. 1970 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Lives and works in New York

Education: Bachelor of Arts degree – Kalamazoo College, Michigan 1992 Master of Fine Arts degree – Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island 1997

“Mehretu’s paintings and drawings refer to elements of mapping and architecture, achieving a calligraphic complexity that resembles turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Architectural renderings and aerial views of urban grids enter the work as fragments, losing their real-world specificity and challenging narrow geographic and cultural readings. The paintings’ wax-like surfaces—built up over weeks and months in thin translucent layers—have a luminous warmth and spatial depth. Their formal qualities of light and space are made all the more complex by Mehretu’s delicate depictions of fire, explosions, and perspectives in both two and three dimensions. Her works engage the history of nonobjective art—from Constructivism to Futurism—posing contemporary questions about the relationship between utopian impulses and abstraction ”relationship between utopian impulses and abstraction.

Source (https://art21.org/artist/julie-mehretu/) (https://art21.org/artist/julie-mehretu/)

Julie Mehretu, Mural. 2009

? https://art21.org/artist/julie-mehretu/Julie Mehretu, Mural. 2009 (Detail showing architecture)

?Julie Mehretu, Mural. 2009 Installation View Watch the segment on Julie Mehretu (the first 15 minutes)

Systems: Art 21—Art in the Twenty-First Century (Se...

?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4F9scZ3idM

Form & Content: Julie Mehretu's Mural

Discuss what you think the form and content are of Julie Mehretu’s painting Mural. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 1 describing what is meant by both form and content.

"Two basic considerations we need to be acquainted with are form: the physical and visible characteristics inherent in works of art, and content: the meaning we derive from them. Formal distinctions include a work's size, medium (painting, drawing, sculpture or other kind of work) and descriptions of compositional elements, such as the lines, shapes, and colors involved. Issues of content include any visual clues that provide an understanding of what the art tells us. Sometimes an artwork's content is vague or hidden and needs more information than is present in the work itself. Ultimately these two terms are roped together in the climb to understand what art has to offer us."

In a paragraph respond to the following three questions.

1. In Julie Mehretu's painting Mural, is the subject representational or abstract? Explain.

2. How does Mehretu arrange the visual elements (i.e. form) in this composition? What elements (line, shape, value, light, color, space, texture) are most prominent and how are they used?

3. In your opinion, what is the underlying meaning of the painting (i.e. content)? What message does the artist convey?