New World Picture

 On August 9, 2014 officer Darren Wilson brutally murdered unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The fatal altercation resulted in Brown’s body lying in the street for roughly four hours. In the wake of the shooting, Ferguson residents flooded the streets and West Florissant Avenue became the central stage on which the social and political unrest began to unfold. For three seemingly endless months, protesters confronted local police enforcement and the National Guard in the streets of Ferguson as they demonstrated pleas for justice. The incident drew national and international attention garnering support all over the globe. Hands raised and voices bellowing from dawn until dusk, demonstrators faced military-style tactics of tear-gas, rubber bullets, and streets barricaded with armed bodies and massive tanks. A scene of civic demonstration resembled the ruinous landscape of war, ravenous appetite of state power, and the fungibility of Black bodies in this landscape. 

 

In her work, Conjured Parts (Eye) Ferguson (2016), Julie Mehretu grapples with the scene of unrest following the grand jury’s decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson with fatally shooting eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. Barrett Emke’s photograph of heavily armed police presence in the streets of Ferguson on the night of the grand jury’s decision becomes the underpainting of Mehretu’s work. She dislodges the characters from their sacred place as figure to make them one with the ground—that is the ground of the painting and the ground upon which they stand. The dispersing group of officers become illegible in Mehretu’s errant black marks caught in a haze of greys, magentas, and greens. The series includes a subset of works that all deploy abstracted photographs of violence, ruin, or dislocation as the grounds for something new. The Conjured Parts series marks a decisive shift in Mehretu’s work from the architectural and schematic drawings of her early errant cartographic practice, to an opaquer mark making practice that resists easy legibility.

I propose to include this work from Mehretu's Conjured Parts series to compliment the collection's holding of Mehretu's 2008 work, Untitled 1 (amulets). Conjured Parts represents a departure from Mehretu's early practice exemplified by the earlier works like Untitled 1 (amulets). Mehretu's oeuvre tackles issues of globalization, dislocation, and migration as well as the violence of all of these processes. Mehretu's work would be an addition to the collections holding of contemporary art of the African Diaspora as well as creating a dialogue surrounding the abstractionist practices of Black women across the diaspora. The work would strengthen the collections holding of works that confront prescient topics of violences as a international and interlocking system of power. 

Julie Mehretu
Conjured Parts (eye), Ferguson
2016
84 x 96 inches
 

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