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Excavations The Prints of Julie Mehretu

EDITIONS

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5 Foreword

6 Beneath the Surface: Julie Mehretu and Printmaking Siri Engberg

13 Catalogue of Prints

44 Selected Print Exhibitions

Contents

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu, presented at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and guest-curated by Siri Engberg.

Highpoint Center for Printmaking/Highpoint EditionsExecutive Director: Carla McGrathArtistic Director and Master Printer: Cole Rogers

Major support for Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu, Highpoint Editions, and the programs of Highpoint Center for Printmaking is provided by: The Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; the Carolyn Foundation; the Hynnek Fund of HRK Foundation; the Jerome Foundation; the Art and Martha Kaemmer Fund of HRK Foundation; Gloria Kaull; Leonard, Street and Deinard Foundation; Martin and Brown Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; the Moore Family Fund for the Arts of the Minneapolis Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; Peregrine Capital Management, Inc. Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; the Pugsley Fund of HRK Foundation; RBC Foundation; R.E. Swager Family Foundation; SURDNA Foundation; Target; Travelers Arts & Diversity Employee Committee, Travelers; Clara Ueland and Walt McCarthy; and Highpoint’s supporting members.

First edition ©2009 Highpoint EditionsEssay ©Siri Engberg

All rights reserved under international and pan-American copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means—electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage-and-retrieval system—without permission in writing from Highpoint Center for Printmaking. Inquiries should be addressed to Executive Director, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, 912 West Lake Street, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55408-2857. Additional catalogues may be available for purchase; please contact 612.871.1326 or info@highpointprintmaking.org.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyrights. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-615-31262-0

Catalogue Designer: Matthew RezacEditor: Pamela Johnson

Printed and bound in the United States by Shapco Printing, Inc., Minneapolis

cover: Entropia (review) 2004 (detail) ©Julie Mehretu Copublished by Highpoint Editions and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

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Foreword

It is a great pleasure to bring all of Julie Mehretu’s prints together in this exhibition. An artist who has rigorously explored printmaking since her first foray into the medium in 2000, Mehretu continues to find innovative means by which to translate her energetic, intri-cate imagery to print. While our experiences working with her have resulted in important editions and inspiring collaborative adventures, we wanted to assemble Mehretu’s published works from all of the workshops with which she has produced prints in order to show the tremendous range this artist has achieved with printmaking over the past decade. For the opening of Highpoint Center for Printmaking’s new facility, we are delighted to have the privilege of exhibiting artworks that embody the efforts of our colleagues from around the country who strive to ensure that collaborative print workshops remain a vital and necessary option for artists to realize a vision or discover a new facet of their work. In her collaborations with the master printers whose publications appear on these pages, Mehretu has found a means by which she can continue to reinvent not only her printmaking, but also her work as a whole. Printmaking has become a catalyst for her approach to other mediums; time spent problem solving with various printers has given

her valuable opportunities to regroup and gather inspiration before embarking on new drawings and paintings. We acknowledge each of the printers for their contributions to this exhibition: Gregory Burnet and assistants Brian Rumbolo and Suzanne Song at Burnet Editions, New York; Maurice Sanchez at Derriere L’Etoile Studios, New York; and Dena Schuckit, Catherine Brooks, and assistants Emily York, Ianne Kjorlie, and Asa Muir-Harmony at Crown Point Press, San Francisco. Important assistance also came from the various publishers, and we are appreciative of the efforts of each: Kathan Brown, Valerie Wade, and Sasha Baguskas at Crown Point Press; David Kiehl at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the New Museum, New York; and Exit Art, New York. The staff at Highpoint Center for Printmaking has worked dili-gently to bring this project to fruition: Zac Adams-Bliss, Senior Printer and Webpage Design; Elizabeth Flinsch, Education and Community Programs Manager; Joanne Price, Exhibitions and Artists’ Cooperative Manager; and Meg Rahn, Membership and Information Manager. We are grateful to Siri Engberg, curator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, for her work as guest curator on this exhibition and for her contributions to the catalogue. The catalogue is the result of the creative contributions of designer Matthew Rezac and the watchful eye of editor Pamela Johnson. We thank them both for their careful shepherding of this publication. Special thanks are also due to Joe King and Gene Pittman for their assistance with shipping and photography, respectively. Finally, we are indebted to Julie Mehretu and her New York gallery, The Project, for their willingness to make the complete prints available for this exhibition and catalogue. Mehretu’s prints form a significant body of work that continues to evolve in remarkable ways, and we are thrilled to have been a part of it.

Cole Rogers, Artistic Director and Master Printer Carla McGrath, Executive Director

Julie Mehretu examining proofs at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, 2004

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The paintings, drawings, and prints of Julie Mehretu are fantastical topographies — surfaces layered with veils of imagery, revealing colonies of painted or inked marks both meandering and precise —that lead us everywhere, all at once. Mehretu creates a palpable tension in her work between figuration and abstraction, presenting us with bits of the recognizable world as quickly as she obscures them again, freely compounding identifiable source material with

Beneath the Surface Julie Mehretu and Printmaking

Siri Engberg

her own lexicon of invented gestures, often armies of them. One could call her an action painter — like Jackson Pollock, she uses marks as units of energy, electrifying her surfaces with a kind of visual momentum only possible through abstraction. Like Robert Motherwell, she has an affinity for the calligraphic in her work, embracing black ink as a painterly medium. And her paintings bring to mind works such as Excavation, Willem de Kooning’s 1950 tour de force with its unruly bodies splintered into fleshy fragments and exploded across a marginless canvas. The real action in Mehretu’s work, though, is as much about erasure as it is about accumulation. As did de Kooning, she applies layers of paint on her canvases only to scrape, sand, and rub them away, revealing traces of what came before as a scaffold on which to build marks anew. She finds poten-tial in the breaking apart of a carefully constructed scheme, and the challenge of reinventing midstory. Mehretu’s place in this legacy of abstraction is one all her own. Her works are rife with social content and narrative, informed, in part, by her own biography. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, she grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. Her education led her from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Dakar, Senegal, and finally to Providence to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, where she majored in painting. There she began to develop the style of draftsmanship now central to her work at large. It was also at this time that she was intro-duced to printmaking. Her first exposure to the medium was through intaglio, which she was drawn to because the technique forced her to slow down and take a more deliberate approach to her mark making. Her palette was also more limited with etching than with painting, so a process of visual distillation was necessary. “When I would go into the inta-glio studio from the painting studio,” Mehretu has remarked, “it was really about taking the most essential elements and trying to work out something with those. The challenge of that really allowed me to develop something else. It somehow was important.”1 This first

exposure to intaglio, and the necessity of thinking about imagery as a system of layers, proved pivotal to the development of Mehretu’s mature practice. Her experimentations with etching began to feed into the drawings she was making at the time, which eventually were to inform the construction of her first fully conceived paintings. As her focus shifted to drawing, Mehretu put printmaking aside for a time but became engaged with printed matter more generally, collecting and incorporating found source material into her drawings and paintings. Early works on paper employed photocopies transferred from topical images of world events—a sea of heads in Tiananmen Square, rioting youth—pulled from newspapers and illuminated with clusters of her own invented marks in the margins. Mehretu found the practice of making drawings on an intimate scale helped her to tap into the intuitive, immediate side of her creative process. She soon began using layers in her works on paper, drawing on translucent drafting vellums laid together in strata, and incorporating elements such as cut paper and colored pencil interposed among her inked lines. Drawing became both a catalyst for painting and a part of her painting process, with ink emerging as her most important medium on both paper and canvas. The artist’s first fully developed paintings made during the following few years began to fuse printed source material and drawing more overtly as a visual language, addressing ideas of inter-connected modern civilizations as well as the history of modernism in general. Fragments from found maps, city grids, weather charts, NFL diagrams, and tattoos soon emerged in the work, as did archi-tectural plans for structures such as stadiums, international airports, and other public gathering hubs; their flickering presence within Mehretu’s compositions conjuring the notion of community, the individual’s place within it, and the way these spaces have functioned through time and across cultures. These typologies of the built envi-ronment, combined with her abstract markings and swaths of crisp color, were also layered with what the artist has called “the symbolic

sampling of visual traditions in art history.”2 The latter came and continues to be drawn from sources of inspiration as divergent as the engravings of Dürer and Rembrandt, large-scale history painting, the wire drawings of Richard Tuttle, the spatially complex paintings of Al Held, street graffiti, or Japanese comic books. Mehretu has often characterized her works as systems of small narratives within a much larger cosmos: “Through the process of reexamining and challenging my paintings, I arrived at the question of how to link my interest in the formation of social identity with my work. I began to look at my mark-making lexicon as signifiers of social agency, as individual char-acters. As the work grew, it developed cities, histories, wars, and geographies. . . . It has become a personal, semibiographical ‘thought experiment’ of my experience.”3

It was not until 2000 that Mehretu reconnected with print-making. Her first formal edition was made at the invitation of Exit Art, the New York alternative space known for its innovative artist collaborations, which approached her to contribute a print to the organization’s annual benefit portfolio. The artist was introduced to Greg Burnet, an independent master printer known for his expertise in intaglio. With her mode of painting now well established, Mehretu found that she now had to “find new ways to do things” that would yield her desired effect in a print.4 In all of her work, she uses layering, as she notes, “to build a different kind of dimension of space and time into the narratives.”5 In her paintings, this scope is assembled in a very physical way, through repeated sanding, then reapplication of paint and gestures, a process that imparts added character and lumines-cence to her surfaces. As if applied on veils of scrim, the lines, washes, and marks appear on top of and beneath one another, amassing into imagery with remarkable depth. At the outset, a major challenge posed by her return to print-making was to devise a means by which this effect could translate to a printed surface through a completely different series of techniques. Burnet suggested chine collé, which allowed Mehretu to print her

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imagery on tissue-thin papers that could then be layered together on press to yield the intricate combinations of translucency and surface sheen that lend her paintings their unique character. Of all the editions the artist has made to date, the Exit Art print is the most self-contained compositionally, an isolated bundle of nota-tions swirling in an empty field of white. From within this tornadic tangle appear bits of a civilization — fragments of buildings, an arena, a sidewalk, tiny marks resembling footprints — merged with tribu-taries, clouds, and other elements of the natural world. Taking a cue from the drawings she was making at the time in ink, colored pencil, and cut paper, Mehretu chose to dispatch color in this first print with a high degree of selectivity. Here, semitransparent overlays of yellow, blue, orange, and peach punctuate the mass of etched lines with knifelike precision. In Rogue Ascension, her second print, the artist worked in lithography with Maurice Sanchez of Derriere L’Etoile Studios. Artist and printer arrived at the use of drafting vellum, printed on both sides, a strategy that lent the work a subtle dimension not typically found in lithography, often one of the flattest of print media. While areas of brilliant color and ink washes inhabit the print’s undersheet, they are obfuscated by the vellum sheet, which supports imagery in sharp black rendered with startling immediacy and almost hallucinatory crispness. Made in 2002, the year after the September 11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, the work emanates a sense of pandemonium: collapsing staircases, windows of a subway car or plane, plumes of flame. Emerging below this urgent narrative are loosely brushed gestures in lithographic tusche that resemble ominous billows of smoke against a bright fall sky. Here, as in many of her images, Mehretu facilitates a process of constant motion for the viewer, creating visual magnets that sometimes act as resting places, but more often form vortexes that draw the eye down through a sea of marks and finally release it some-where else on the surface.

Mehretu has often used a structure in her work of an opening up of the composition—a kind of “center space of [ascension] and descension.”6 This is a notion that she has examined in a number of works: “There’s this idea that happens in cultures and through time that if we try to understand the cosmos there’s this place above that is a point of destination, a point of beginning. . . . I think of it in terms of an hourglass shape. . . . There’s a space in the center where there’s really nothing going on, [and yet there is]. I feel that there’s a force extending from the top to the bottom, all this activity goes around just beyond it. To me that’s a point of potential, a point of departure. The beginning.”7

This compositional quality is evident in Entropia (review), a lithograph and screenprint made in 2004 where the “hourglass” shape emerges as the focal center within a camouflagelike pattern of colors. The previous year, Mehretu participated in an artist’s

residency at the Walker Art Center, which resulted in an exhibition of seven new paintings. While in Minneapolis, she began collaborating with master printer Cole Rogers of Highpoint Editions on what would be the largest print project she had yet undertaken. Entropia (review) was the only edition in which one of the artist’s existing paintings, the 2003 canvas Looking back to a bright new future, was used as a specific starting point. Her first experience with screenprinting, the print incorporates her most ambitious use of color — thirty-two in all — in her editions to date. Mehretu is a highly decisive colorist. Her marks laid down in color are of a wholly different character than those in black. Often scattered across the image surface like scraps of carefully snipped paper, the artist’s sky-blue trapezoids, thin arcs of ochre, strips of brilliant crimson, and vectors of rose are often distilled from logos, signage, and other fragments of commercial visual culture. The colors become an independent system of floating gestures that lend subtle overgirding to the delicately constructed chaos of her overall compo-sitions. Like the painting to which it is related, Entropia (review) is cartographic, its regions of pastel blues, greens, and browns recalling the palette of a globe; the “Entropia” of its title suggesting a reimag-ined territory where disorder reigns. Mehretu developed a working computer drawing for the areas of color, which served as the basis for the screenprinting stencils. Additional drawings on vellum became lithographic plates, which were used to add architectural elements plucked from the paintings included in her Walker exhibition. A related print, Entropia: Construction, made with Rogers in 2005, shares three of these plates (and adds a fourth) to create a grisaille rendition of the image. Here, the removal of color creates a dynamic superimposition of drawing styles—a mind-boggling slurry of lines and pictures that seems to pour into a sinkhole at the work’s center. Mehretu began to further explore chiaroscuro of black and white in a number of works developed at this time. Paintings such as Transcending: The New International (2003) were rendered

Editioning Entropia (review) at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, 2004

exclusively in India ink, a departure from the riotous, brightly colored geometries appearing in other works made the same year. Here, the artist delved into a study of line more intensely, layering images with unprecedented intricacy. In addition to the marks made with a Rapidograph pen, which allows for ultrafine, meticulous lines, Mehretu began to incorporate more brushstrokes, diluted ink washes, and other atmospheric imagery that calls to mind thunderheads, craggy cliffs, mountainous contours, and other compelling allusions to landscape. In her use of these elements, the artist is interested in archetypes that have appeared throughout the history of art. In particular, her mining of visual sources such as old master engravings or Japanese painted scrolls investigates ways that natural compo-nents such as hillsides, trees, rivers, and dramatic skies become visual building blocks—the “mood enhancers” of the image—wherein beams of light radiating through clouds invoke imaginings of a world beyond and the sublime. Mehretu has noted her interest in “the potential of ‘psychogeographies,’ which suggests that within an invisible and invented creative space, the individual can tap a resource of self-determination and resistance.”8 The worlds she invents through land-scape are amalgams of locales both inside and outside the mind’s eye. A focused exploration of this terrain was particularly well-suited for Mehretu’s work in etching. For nearly two years, she worked in collaboration with printer Greg Burnet on the production of the 2004 suite Landscape Allegories, her first experience creating prints in a serial format. Developing a visual narrative that could unfold across several images, each focusing on “one part of the phenomenon,” was an important exercise in uncovering the power of these archetypes to convey symbolic meaning. It was also a project in which she examined the subtleties of the etched line more closely, deliberately consid-ering ways that various types of line would hold ink. The artist recalls that each print in the series began with multiple plates, which she and Burnet then pared back, removing much of the color. She began to explore the process of mixing slight amounts of color into black ink

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to investigate “how that would affect the image and the tone of the image.”9 Mehretu considers Landscape Allegories to be more lyrical than many of her other editions. Here, the urban infrastructure is temporarily held at bay—absent is the built environment, hard-edged geometry, and the pointed perspective that she often uses to drive the eye. Rather than incorporate landscape as a supplemental compo-sitional ingredient, the artist chose in these prints to focus on natural elements specifically, allowing them to carry the narrative. In 2005, Mehretu was invited to work at Crown Point Press, a workshop renowned for its collaborative projects with artists in the medium of etching. Arriving in San Francisco just two weeks after Hurricane Katrina had ravished New Orleans, she began work with master printer Dena Schuckit on a group of prints that evoked the chaos and disjointedness of the storm’s attack and devastating after-math. By this time Mehretu had developed a confidence with etching processes, and she immersed herself working directly on the copper plates.10 The three large prints made that fall are filled with free-flowing movement — dynamic, immediate, and assured, the gestures bold and looser than in many of her paintings. Slicing through the marks are shards of planar color, razor sharp rays and orthogonals, and sweeping lines that seem to glide across the surface like air currents. In these etchings, one senses an artist entirely at one with her process, certain of the medium’s capacity for invention. Mehretu returned to Crown Point in 2007 to make two addi-tional large-scale etchings, Unclosed and The Residual, editions that further investigate the more intuitive side of her mark making. Like Landscape Allegories, these are almost exclusively gestural images, with lines ammased in peaks and valleys. In both prints, the imagery is pulled densely to the very margins of the plate, generating an impression of vastness, and a distinct sense of hovering above the surface, as if mountainscapes are being viewed through windows of a plane. The aerial sensation is intensified in Unclosed, where groups of radial lines emanating from center points litter the landscape like

sites of bombings. The intersection of war with nature is a theme addressed in much of Mehretu’s work, played out here within a strong narrative of abstraction. Mehretu’s most recent prints move further into the arena of pure gesture. An untitled 2006 etching made with Burnet for the art journal Parkett is a meditation on movement and convergence, with wispy black lines joined into a feathery form rising from the image’s central vanishing point—a strange sort of phoenix. Fracture, made the following year, also exhibits these winglike structures superimposed on watery areas of grey-blue aquatint that form a “ghost image” beneath the dark black overmarkings. Rather than a compilation of disparate imagery, these later prints function almost as zoom-in details, areas where the artist can resolve the character of her marks with more specificity. After nearly a decade of engagement with the medium, Mehretu has found that often her selected technique drives her imagery: aquatint lends itself to larger swaths of color, drypoint facilitates the fields of tiny markings that populate her prints, chine collé allows her to encapsulate imagery, embedding it within the paper surface. From her earliest experience working with Burnet, Mehretu noted that the collaborative process of printmaking “very subtly adjusted the way I was thinking about what I was painting again.”11 Today, she sees her time in the print workshop as “actually about trying to see fundamental things, like how the ink sits on the paper, and how different techniques give different results and affect the way the image can look. It usually was, and is, in the printmaking that new things are invented, which I then want to bring into the painting and drawing.”12 She is now drawn to printmaking as a process of “taking apart and putting back together,”13 examining her own work, then excavating it to create layers of visual and conceptual meaning. Making prints has become for Mehretu an integral part of her creative explo-rations, a site for discovery. For us, in the visual journey across the intricacies of her printed surfaces, we find the greatest pleasure in allowing ourselves to become lost.

1 Julie Mehretu, in a telephone conver-sation with the author, May 8, 2009.

2 Julie Mehretu, e-mail interview with Olukemi Ilesanmi, in “Looking Back,” Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 12.

3 Ibid., 11.4 Mehretu, conversation.5 Julie Mehretu, interview by David

Binkley and Kinsey Katchka, March 28, 2003, in “Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora,” National Museum of American Art, http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/passages/ mehretu-conversation.html.

6 Ibid.7 Ibid.

8 Julie Mehretu, quoted in Catherine de Zegher, “Julie Mehretu’s Eruptive Lines of Flight as Ethos of Revolution,” in Julie Mehretu: Drawings (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2007), 32.

9 Mehretu, conversation.10 See Kathan Brown, “Julie Mehretu:

Heavy Weather,” in Overview, Crown Point Press newsletter, Winter 2006, 2.

11 Mehretu, conversation.12 Ibid.13 Julie Mehretu, quoted in Kathan

Brown, “Julie Mehretu: Unclosed and The Residual,” in Overview, Crown Point Press newsletter, Spring 2008, 3.

Notes

Julie Mehretu at work on an etching plate at Crown Point Press, San Francisco, 2007

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Julie Mehretu works on a drawing at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, 2004

Notes on the CatalogueThe following information is derived from documentation released by the workshops or publishers of Julie Mehretu’s prints. Works are listed in chronological order. Dimensions noted indicate sheet size, with height preceding width. Abbreviations used in the proofs category are defined as follows: AP Artist’s Proofs TP Trial Proofs PP Printer’s Proofs BAT Bon à Tirer HC Hors CommerceAny other proofs not listed above are described in full within the print’s entry.

Julie MehretuCatalogue of Prints

2000–2007Compiled by Siri Engberg

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1

Untitled from the portfolio twoandthreezeros 2000 etching with aquatint, engraving, and drypoint with chine collé and pochoir on Somerset Textured White 250 gsm paper 22 x 30 in. (55.9 x 76.2 cm)

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Edition: 50 Proofs: 8 AP, 5 PP Printer: Gregory Burnet; assisted by Suzanne Song, Burnet Editions, New York Publisher: Exit Art, New York Comments: This print, included in the portfolio twoandthreezeros, was published as part of an annual series of benefit portfolios for Exit Art, a nonprofit cultural center based in New York City. The portfolio also included prints by Louise Bourgeois, Patty Chang, Peter Hildebrand, Sol LeWitt, Kerry James Marshall, Yigal Ozeri, and Shahzia Sikander, with a cover by Papo Colo.

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Rogue Ascension 2002 lithograph on Somerset Satin White paper and Denril vellum 24 ½ x 32 in. (62.2 x 81.3 cm)

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Edition: 35 Proofs: 7 AP Printer: Maurice Sanchez, Derriere L’Etoile Studios, New York Publisher: New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; produced by Lisa Ivorian Gray Comments: Rogue Ascension was released as part of the Limited Edition series at the New Museum, New York.

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Entropia (review) 2004 lithograph and screenprint on Arches 88 paper 33 ½ x 44 in. (85.1 x 111.8 cm)

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Edition: 45 Proofs: 6 AP, 4 TP, 6 PP, 1 BAT, 2 Archive Proofs, 2 Handling Copies Printer: Cole Rogers; assisted by Mia Keeler, Tyler Starr, Joanne Price, and Zac Adams, Highpoint Editions, Minneapolis Publisher: Highpoint Editions and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Comments: Begun by the artist in 2002, this print was commissioned on the occasion of Mehretu’s yearlong residency at the Walker Art Center, which culminated in the touring exhibition Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting, organized and presented by the Walker in 2003.

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Landscape Allegories 2004 portfolio of 7 etchings, with aquatint, spit-bite, engraving, and drypoint on Somerset Textured White 250 gsm paper 19 x 21 ½ in. (48.3 x 54.6 cm) each

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Edition: 35 Proofs: 5 AP Printer: Gregory Burnet; assisted by Brian Rumbolo, Burnet Editions, New York Publisher: Ridinghouse, London, and The Project, New York Comments: The prints in this series are housed in a red portfolio box fabricated by Book Works, London.

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overleaf: Landscape Allegories (details)

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Entropia: Construction 2005 lithograph on four sheets of gampi paper chine collé, mounted to Somerset Satin White paper 40 x 49 ¾ in. (101.6 x 126.4 cm)

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Edition: 30 Proofs: 7 AP, 4 TP, 5 PP, 1 BAT, 1 HC, 1 Archive Proof, 1 Presentation Proof Printer: Cole Rogers; assisted by Zac Adams and Justin Strom, Highpoint Editions, Minneapolis Publisher: Highpoint Editions, Minneapolis Comments: This work shares three preparatory drawings (transferred to lithographic plates) with the print Entropia (review) (cat. no. 3), published in 2004 by Highpoint Editions and the Walker Art Center. For Entropia: Construction, Mehretu added a fourth drawing, which was transferred to a lithographic plate. There are no further variants using the drawings that comprise the two prints.

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Circulation 2005 hard-ground etching with aquatint and engraving on gampi paper chine collé 35 ½ x 46 ¾ in. (90.2 x 118.8 cm)

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Edition: 25 Proofs: 10 AP, 5 TP, including 1 “OK to Print” Printer: Dena Schuckit; assisted by Catherine Brooks and Emily York, Crown Point Press, San Francisco Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco Comments: This print is part of series of three images Mehretu created while in residence at Crown Point Press in the fall of 2005.

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7

Diffraction 2005 sugar-lift aquatint with aquatint, spit-bite aquatint, and hard-ground etching on gampi paper chine collé 35 ½ x 46 ¾ in. (90.2 x 118.8 cm)

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Edition: 35 Proofs: 10 AP, 6 TP, including 1 “OK to Print” Printer: Dena Schuckit; assisted by Catherine Brooks and Emily York, Crown Point Press, San Francisco Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco Comments: This print is part of series of three images Mehretu created while in residence at Crown Point Press in the fall of 2005.

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8

Local Calm 2005 sugar-lift aquatint with aquatint, spit-bite aquatint, soft-ground and hard-ground etching, and engraving on gampi paper chine collé 35 ½ x 46 ¾ in. (90.2 x 118.8 cm)

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Edition: 35 Proofs: 10 AP, 5 TP, including 1 “OK to Print” Printer: Dena Schuckit; assisted by Catherine Brooks and Emily York, Crown Point Press, San Francisco Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco Comments: This print is part of series of three images Mehretu created while in residence at Crown Point Press in the fall of 2005.

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9

Deluge 2005 etching with aquatint, engraving, and drypoint on Somerset Textured White 250 gsm paper 20 x 24 ½ in. (50.8 x 62.2 cm)

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Edition: 3 Proofs: 1 PP, 1 HC Printer: Gregory Burnet; assisted by Brian Rumbolo, Burnet Editions, New York Publisher: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Comments: This print was made on the occasion of the American Art Award, an annual benefit for corporate donors sponsored by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Several of the plates in the print are adapted from the Landscape Allegories series made in collaboration with Burnet in 2004.

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Untitled 2006 etching with engraving and drypoint on Somerset Textured White 300 gsm paper 23 ¼ x 28 ¼ inches (60 x 71.1 cm)

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Edition: 60 Proofs: 25, numbered I–XXV Printer: Gregory Burnet; assisted by Brian Rumbolo, Burnet Editions, New York Publisher: Parkett Publishers, Zürich and New York Comments: This print was published by the contemporary art journal Parkett as part of its limited-edition publishing program. The edition was released in conjunction with Parkett issue number 76.

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The Residual 2007 sugar-lift and spit-bite aquatints with hard-ground etching, drypoint, and burnishing 40 ¾ x 50 ¼ in. (103.5 x 127.6 cm)

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Edition: 25 Proofs: 10 AP, 5 TP, including 1 “OK to Print” Printer: Catherine Brooks; assisted by Ianne Kjorlie and Asa Muir-Harmony, Crown Point Press, San Francisco Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco

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12

Unclosed 2007 hard-ground etching with spit-bite aquatint and drypoint 40 ¾ x 50 ¼ in. (103.5 x 127.6 cm)

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Edition: 25 Proofs: 10 AP, 7 TP, including 1 “OK to Print” Printer: Catherine Brooks, assisted by Ianne Kjorlie and Asa Muir-Harmony, Crown Point Press, San Francisco Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco

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Refuge 2007 etching with aquatint, sugar lift, and spit bite on Somerset Textured White 300 gsm paper 23 ¼ x 28 in. (59.1 x 71.1 cm)

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Edition: 45 Proofs: 14 AP Printer: Gregory Burnet; assisted by Brian Rumbolo, Burnet Editions, New York Publisher: Burnet Editions, New York

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Fracture 2007 etching with aquatint, sugar lift, spit bite, engraving, and drypoint on Somerset Textured White 300 gsm paper 23 ¼ x 28 in. (59.1 x 71.1 cm)

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Edition: 30 Proofs: 12 AP Printer: Gregory Burnet; assisted by Brian Rumbolo, Burnet Editions, New York Publisher: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark

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The exhibitions listed below, which represent only a fraction of the solo and group shows featuring Julie Mehretu’s work, were selected for their specific inclusion of the artist’s prints.

2008New Prints 2008/Spring, International Print Center New York.

2007 Paper Trail: A Decade of Acquisitions, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; traveled to the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa.

2006 Julie Mehretu: Heavy Weather, Crown Point Press, San Francisco; traveled to The Print Center, Philadelphia. The Art of Etching at Crown Point Press, Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, Santa Monica, California.The Compulsive Line: Etching 1900 to Now, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

2005 Prints into Drawings, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.New Prints 2005/Autumn, International Print Center New York.New Prints 2005/Winter, International Print Center New York.

2004Landscape Allegories, Thomas Dane Gallery, London.

Selected Print Exhibitions

Entropia (review) and Entropia: Construction appear in the exhibition courtesy Highpoint Editions, Minneapolis. All other works by Julie Mehretu in the exhibition have been generously loaned by the artist and The Project, New York.

pages 4, 8, 12Photos courtesy Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis

page 11Photo courtesy Crown Point Press, San Francisco

pages 19–23, 25Photos courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

pages 15, 17, 27, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43Photos: Gene Pittman

Collection and Photography Credits

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