Julie Mehretu’s HOWL, eon (I, II) occupies the walls on either side of SFMOMA’s main staircase. The Haas, Jr. Atrium is free to enter, so the two canvases can be the reason for a visit or something encountered on the way to meeting a friend. You do not have to buy a ticket before spending time with them.
Completed in 2017, the diptych begins with photographs and historical images that have been digitally distorted. Contemporary protests and racial conflict sit beneath paint and ink, alongside nineteenth-century depictions of the American West. Mehretu adds marks through brushwork, spraying and screen printing. Some of the history is obscured before another layer even reaches the canvas.
The historical images complicate the pleasure of looking at a landscape. Nineteenth-century representations of the American West sit with material concerning present-day racial conflict and protest. The paint does not illustrate those events in a straightforward sequence. It makes different periods occupy the same surface, refusing the convenient distance of treating expansion as a finished chapter.
Born in Addis Ababa in 1970, she works across painting, drawing and printmaking; MoMA’s collection alone offers dozens of examples. At SFMOMA, the scale makes this particular work part of the building’s everyday traffic. The stairs divide it, people pass through it, and the museum’s own activity keeps happening between the two sides.
Their placement keeps that history in a space people actually move through. The stairs divide the canvases, and visitors pass between them while the museum goes about its day. A painting concerned with occupation and conflict is encountered in the act of using a public interior. It is worth going downstairs with enough time to stop.