I always wanted to be an artist, but I didn't really know how someone could make a life out it.

- Julie Mehretu

I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

- Julie Mehretu

When you're not a mom, you can get up in the middle of the night, paint, sleep all morning... you can't do that when you have two children!

- Julie Mehretu

People look at film in a gallery, and if they walk out after two minutes they know they haven't seen the whole work. But then people look at a painti…

- Julie Mehretu

The erasure itself became the action. It seemed to suggest a moment in terms of how sad or pessimistic you can feel in a political environment or a h…

- Julie Mehretu

I'm not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.

- Julie Mehretu

The investigation of making is illuminating towards that moment rather than the other way around, a reversal of the way that I would approach making …

- Julie Mehretu

You're not just this person who's from your own specific experiences, but the collective experience of what makes you who you are because of time.

- Julie Mehretu

The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies—mapping, charting, and architecture—to try an…

- Julie Mehretu