2000 grantee Julie Mehretu is a New York City-based visual artist who was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She received her grant at age 30 when she was in the midst of building a new studio to enable her to work on large-scale paintings. The FCA grant helped finance the studio as well as Mehretu’s first solo museum exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. This show was an important event in Mehretu’s career and led to national recognition.
Soon after her FCA grant, Mehretu’s was featured in solo exhibitions at The Detroit Institute of Arts; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark; the St. Louis Art Museum and White Cube, London, among others. Additionally, her work was included in group shows at MoMA and the Whitney Museum. Her work, which is widely sought by collectors, can be found in public collections worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; MoMA; the National Gallery of Art; the Walker Art Center; the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2005, Mehretu was named a MacArthur Fellow, which came with a $500,000 award, and was given the American Art Award by the Whitney Museum. Solo exhibitions of Mehretu’s work were presented at Deutsche Guggenheim Museum in Berlin in 2009 and the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2010. Mehretu was recently commissioned by Goldman Sachs to create an immense site-specific mural, which now hangs in the lobby of their New York City headquarters.
