There is an art, it has been said, to getting lost, not lost as in confused or defeated, but lost as in absorbed and activated, a freedom that comes from surrendering to the moment. That surrender is part of what makes Julie Mehretu’s paintings so compelling, asking viewers to sit with the uncertainty of the present long enough to imagine something new.
“That is, to me, really important about the work,” says Mehretu, 56. “It becomes this very experiential kind of thing, and you take from it as much as you want. Maybe you catch the paintings start to change and then you notice that and then you get lost looking for all of that.” Her abstraction, in other words, is built to reward attention rather than to explain itself.
That sensibility now anchors one of her most public projects: a monumental stained-glass work titled Uprising of the Sun, created for the Obama Presidential Center. Mehretu wanted the piece to connect Barack Obama’s legacy, African American history, Ethiopian stained glass, and the physical experience of rising through the building and looking out at the city.
Her references span history and geography. They range from an image of the Obamas crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis to Robert S. Duncanson’s 1861 painting The Land of the Lotus Eaters, Jacob Lawrence’s 1975 screenprint Confrontation on the Bridge, and the stained-glass windows of Afewerk Tekle in Addis Ababa, the city where Mehretu was born. The result folds a personal lineage into a national one.
The work is designed to change with the light. Its exterior panels are opalescent, so their colors stay visible from outside, and at night, when the building is illuminated, the piece reverses into what Mehretu calls a little beacon for the building. Inside, visitors encounter translucent color as they move from floor to floor, the experience shifting with the time of day and the play of external and internal light.
For an artist long associated with dense, map-like abstractions of cities and histories, the commission translates that language into architecture and glass. Mehretu frames Uprising of the Sun not as a fixed statement but as an ongoing encounter, one that asks each visitor to find their own way through its layers, much as her paintings do.
