Julie Mehretu quotes:

Race always comes up in the conversation of Detroit.

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 painting for two minutes and think they've seen it. Certain paintings are made to be consumed fast. But some require a slowed-down time. You have to go back to them.

That's what I'm interested in: the space in between, the moment of imagining what is possible and yet not knowing what that is.

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!

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 historical situation. But it felt like a really hopeful gesture in the painting.

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

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.

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.

I don't ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that.

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 a painting before. I think that it gets to a richer illumination of the moment, which is what I was trying to do at the beginning but going about it a little backwards.

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