Julie Mehretu
In conversation with Julia Bryan-Wilson
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
5:00-7:00pm
Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley
Please note, seating is first come, first served.
Co-sponsored by The Arts Research Center, the Department of Art Practice, The Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, and the Center for Race & Gender
In this conversation, billed as a continuation of their 2019 CCA “Distinguished Artist Interviews” where esteemed artists discuss their work with a colleague, world renowned painter Julie Mehretu will be interviewed by Julia Bryan-Wilson.
Julie Mehretu is a world renowned painter, born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970 who lives and works in New York City and Berlin. She received a Master’s of Fine Art with honors from The Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. Mehretu is a recipient of many awards, including the The MacArthur Award (2005) and the US Department of State Medal of Arts Award (2015). She has shown her work extensively in international and national solo and group exhibitions and is represented in public and private collections around the world. Recent projects include completing two large-scale paintings for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Atrium in September 2017, entitled HOWL eon (I, II). Currently participating in the Venice Biennale, upcoming exhibitions include Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, and a mid-career retrospective beginning at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in November 2019, and traveling to The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, High Museum in Atlanta, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
Julia Bryan-Wilson (Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art) teaches art since 1945 in the US, Europe, and Latin America; she is also the Director of the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center. Her research interests include theories of artistic labor, feminist and queer theory, performance and dance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California, 2009, named a best book of the year by the New York Times and Artforum); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson, 2016); and Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017, a New York Times best art book of the year and winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award, the Robert Motherwell Book Award, and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize). She is the editor of OCTOBER Files: Robert Morris (MIT Press, 2013), and co-editor of two special journal issues (“Visual Activism,” Journal of Visual Culture, 2016; and “Time Zones: Durational Art in its Contexts,” Representations, 2016).
Bryan-Wilson is an adjunct curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where in 2019 she co-curated the exhibit Women’s Histories. With Andrea Andersson, she curated Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans in 2017 and traveled to the Berkeley Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, and the ICA Philadelphia. She is currently writing a book about Louise Nevelson (under advanced contract with Yale University Press). Bryan-Wilson has published articles in Afterall, Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Artforum, Bookforum, Camera Obscura, differences, Grey Room, October, the Journal of Modern Craft, Oxford Art Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, and many other venues. Her article “Invisible Products” received the 2013 Art Journal Award.
Image: Julie Mehretu, Of Other Planes of There (S.R.), detail, 2018-2019, ink and acrylic on canvas, 108 x 120 inches. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, © Julie Mehretu