Julie Mehretu: Politicized Landscapes

For the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Julie Mehretu recontextualizes the history of American landscape painting by merging its sublime imagery with the harsh realities not depicted. "What does it mean to paint a landscape and be an artist in this political moment?" she asks from the decommissioned Harlem church used as her studio for the project. Referencing the ways that landscapes have been politicized through historical events—from the violent expansion of the American West, colonialism, war, and abolition, through to more recent race riots and social protests—Mehretu began by combining photographs from these events with nineteenth-century landscape paintings. The paintings become "visual neologisms," that combine the work and inventions of past artists, "to address when language isn't enough."