Detroit

"For the artist Julie Mehretu, who grew up largely in East Lansing, Mich., the Detroit Institute of Arts and other vintage downtown landmarks have the cast of magnificent relics.
“For me the issues that come up with Detroit — as this Modernist city that is in many ways abandoned or erased, all the changes it’s gone through and the very different kinds of communities that have affected that — are really interesting,” she said in an interview at her studio in New York.

Today the institute is in the process of unerasing itself. On Nov. 23 it is to reopen to the public after a $158 million expansion by the architect Michael Graves. Curators are reinstalling the museum’s encyclopedic collection, remolding the way the public experiences the art in the hope of attracting new visitors.

In tandem with the opening the museum invited Ms. Mehretu, 36, to address Detroit in some way by creating work for galleries adjacent to the Rivera frescoes.
She produced five new paintings, joined by seven other recent Mehretu works called “City Sitings.” “Diego’s murals also deal with these issues — in a very different time — of what Detroit was,” Ms. Mehretu said. “That overlap and conversation make it an exciting place to do a show.”

Ms. Mehretu’s personal history is entwined with the exhibition as well. Born in Ethiopia to an American mother and Ethiopian father who is an economic geographer, she lived the immigrant’s experience when her family moved in the late 1970s to East Lansing for her father’s teaching position at Michigan State University. She was 7 years old."

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