Montserrat College of Art Commencement
Set for Friday, May 23, 2008

Julie Mehretu Delivers Remarks and
Receives Honorary Doctorate

Montserrat College of Art will hold its 38th Commencement on Friday, May 23, starting at 11:00 a.m. The ceremony will take place at the Cabot Cinema, 286 Cabot Street, Beverly, MA.

Fifty-two students will receive Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in concentrations including Fine Arts, Graphic Design, Illustration, Painting and Drawing, Photography, Printmaking, and Sculpture. A reception for students and their families will take place at the Beverly Common, adjacent to the Hardie Building, 23 Essex Street, following the ceremony.

Commencent speaker will be New York artist Julie Mehretu, who will receive an honorary doctorate. The faculty speaker will be Scott Hadfield, Senior Fine Arts Seminar Teacher in the Painting Department, and the student speakers will be Chelsea Sams, who will receive a sef-directed Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and Jeff Havens, who will receive his BFA in Painting.

Graduation is attended by invitation only; reporters interested in covering the event should contact the Office of Public Relations.

Julie Mehretu (b. 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is an American artist best known for her densely-layered abstract paintings and prints. Raised in Michigan, Mehretu was educated at the University Cheik Anta Diop (UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal, Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1997. She now lives and works in New York City. Mehretu is represented by Christian Haye of The Project gallery in New York City and shows work with Jay Jopling at the White Cube art gallery in London.

Mehretu's work incorporates the visual vocabulary of maps, urban-planning grids, and architectural forms as it alternates between historical narratives and fictional landscapes. One of the artists featured in the Walker Art Center's 2001 exhibition ‘Painting at the Edge of the World,’ Mehretu creates paintings that combine abstract forms with the familiar, such as the Roman Coliseum and floor plans from international airports. This exhibition features nine newly commissioned, large-scale paintings and concludes her yearlong artist residency at the Walker Art Center.

Mehretu combines a personal language of signs and symbols with architectural imagery to create her elaborate paintings. Simultaneously engaged with the formal concerns of color and line and the social concerns of power, history, globalism, and personal narrative, she is interested in "the multifaceted layers of place, space, and time that impact the formation of personal and communal identity." The underlying structure of her work consists of socially charged public spaces--government buildings, museums, stadiums, schools, and airports--drawn in the form of maps and diagrams. She inscribes her own narrative into these spaces through the layering of personal markings. Mehretu achieves an effect of compositional maelstrom, as elements advance and recede within the graphically ambiguous spaces.

She has exhibited in several important group exhibitions including ‘Poetic Justice’, 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003), Whitney Biennial (2004), São Paolo Biennial (2004), Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2004) and Biennale of Sydney (2006). Solo exhibitions include Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, REDCAT, Los Angeles and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2003), St Louis Art Museum (2005) and MUSAC, Léon, Spain (2006).

Julie Mehretu, Untitled, 2005,
watercolor on paper, 21 7/8" x 29 3/4".

Julie Mehretu, photographed by Robert Maxwell, 2004.