If you thought Lari Pittman, Richard Serra, or Jeff Koons were large-scale then you’ve never seen anything by Julie Mehretu.

Julie Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa in 1970 to an Ethiopian college professor and a white American teacher. When she was six and a half years old, the family had to flee the country due to a brutal Socialist dictatorship. They went to none other than East Lansing, Michigan, where the former CEO of Google, Larry Page is from. Neat! Julie acclimated well to American life and now identifies solely as ‘Murican.

She attended Kalamazoo College in Michigan where she started kinda maybe sort of wanting to be an artist. She went abroad for her junior year to Dakar, Senegal, where she learned Wolof, the language spoken there, which is annoyingly impressive. This semester strengthened her sense of her African heritage and also inspired her to pursue art.

After college she and two friends decided that San Francisco was where it was at. Their reasoning: “Two of us were gay, and alternative, and we thought that was the place to be.” They quickly decided that it was not, in fact, the place to be and they headed to New York, where Mehretu would be for the next three years until she got a full ride to RISD. And from there her career took off so fast it made even her own head spin. She got into a residency through the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston after which she was represented by Barbara Davis gallery. In 1999, she moved back to New York where gallery representation, an eventual MacArthur “genius” Grant and most importantly love was waiting for her. Mehretu was out one night and met the Australian artist, Jessica Rankin. Mehretu’s flirting skills were subpar and “she gave [Jessica] a hard time about the situation of white Australia and the indigenous population” but Rankin was still into it. They got married in Scotland in 2008 and have two sons.

Mehretu is an absurdly cool artist, but one artwork has gotten her a lot of flack. She got a $5,000,000 commission from Goldman Sachs, the not so honest investment banking company. They offered her the space to create one of her biggest works yet, a 23 x 80 foot abstract piece called Mural. The only downside was that it was for Goldman Sachs. Granted, she did put 80% of the money towards materials and her assistants' salaries, but still. When asked whether or not she would do it again, Mehretu replied, “Without hesitation. I don’t see it as an evil institution, but as part of the larger system we all participate in. We’re all part of it. And, anyway, for me it was about making something—it was about the art.” To be fair at the time no one knew exactly how bad the company was...