Julie Mehretu is and Ethiopian/ American painter. Julie was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970 and came to school in the United States. She claimed her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence in 1997. Her work mainly composes of large scale murals that are charged with her feelings on certain topics.

For example, her piece Politicized Landscapes is an abstract piece that has multiple layers to the process. She begins with blurred photos that give her a sense of how she wants to start. She prints those out large scale and stapled to the canvas. I love that she uses the photos that inspire her within the art but blow it up to where it is not blatant. After the photos are placed, she begins meticulously marking it as it feels. The work ends as a powerful and chaotic piece that comments on the hectic political climate. Using the blurred pictures as the color sets the tone as calm but fire-like.

Her pieces consist of various marks, lines, and shapes, creating high, explosive energy that is simply eye catching as the next line leads to another line or shape. looking at it as a whole provides a different experience than looking at it bit by bit.

I chose Julie because of her dynamic shapes and colors that make it stand out. Usually I prefer people within the pieces because I can connect an emotion to a face or to body language. However, in her artwork I see a visual representation of emotions using random shapes and lines. I believe it is because she says she takes how she feels about the topic and goes from there. She is finished when she feels she’s finished; there is something interesting about that. To me that communicates feelings are very in the moment just like her brush strokes.

Julie Mehretu is an interesting artist that I am glad I found. She has provided me with a new perspective on art. My taste mostly consisted of humans and expressing their emotions through facial or body expressions. I see now that a human form is not needed to express such emotions, it can be abstracted into chaos rather than put into a bodily expression.

Joana Vasconcelos was born in 1971 in Lisbon, Portugal. Not much is widely available about her personal life, but she has been in art exhibits since the 1990s. She became known more internationally due to her work A Novia, an elegant chandelier made out of tampons, in 2005.

Many of her works incorporate crocheted lace patterns, sewn plush matterial, or large objects made out of hundreds to thousands of objects such as pots, pans, tampons, and ostrich feathers. In 2012, She became the youngest artist, and the first woman, to exhibit their work in the Palace of Versailles.

Vasconcelos’ works tend to explore different issues such as consumerism or gender identity. In 2018, the artist claimed her 2002 Burka as her most feminist piece. “It’s about the limitations put on female identity, but also how this loss of identity can offer safety, even power.”

One of her more recent popular works is Pop Galo. Pop Galo is a ten meter tall statue of a rooster, covered in hand painted tiles and LED lights. The giant bird is based on the Rooster of Barcelos, one of the most important symbols in Portuguese popular culture. The statue was first displayed to the public in Lisbon November 2016, and has since traveled as far as Beijing, China.

There exists somewhere a film showcasing Vasconcelos’s creative process for an exhibition in 2013. I tried to find it. All I found was stuff about the pavilion where it took place. Her website, joanavasconcelos.com has a whole paragraph trying to describe her creative process:

“The nature of Joana Vasconcelos’s creative process is based on the appropriation, decontextualisation and subversion of pre-existent objects and everyday realities…. From this process there derives a speech which is attentive to contemporary idiosyncrasies…”

Works Cited:

http://www.popgalo.com/pequim/?lang=en&f=2

http://joanavasconcelos.com/biografia_en.aspx

http://joanavasconcelos.com/obras_en.aspx