SFMOMA, Part 8: HOWL, eon (I, II).
You don't need a ticket for this one. Walk into SFMOMA, past the ticket desks, into the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Atrium — part of the museum's 45,000 square feet of free public space — and look up. The main staircase climbs through the middle of a soaring cylindrical hollow, and on either side of it, two walls rise twenty-seven feet high and run thirty-two feet wide, each carrying a single painting. You feel them before you read them: two vast fields of luminous color and black calligraphic fury, flanking the stairs like canyon walls. People stream up and down between them on their way to the paid floors, most of them glancing sideways, the way you glance at weather.
Get closer and the weather resolves into handwriting. Layered tangles of black marks — sweeping curves, staccato blips, smoky erasures, blots like Rorschach tests — drift across washes of pale gold, ash gray, and bruised blue. Underneath, sealed in acrylic, are ghosts: blurred photographs, inkjet-printed and half-dissolved, of street protests, race riots, sirens, flames, and 19th-century engravings of the American West. You can't quite make them out, which is the point. They're embedded, the artist says, like DNA — something the painting knows in its body that it doesn't show on its face.
There is a catch to the room, and the room knows it. Slender white columns rise to hold up the oculus, and they stand directly in front of both canvases, cutting each one into slices. There is no single spot in the atrium where you can see either painting whole. You have to walk — up the stairs, across the bridge, down again — assembling the thing from glimpses. For a painting about a country you can never see all at once, the obstruction feels less like a flaw than a thesis.
This is Julie Mehretu's HOWL, eon (I, II), painted 2016–2017. It is ink and acrylic on canvas, and each panel measures 324 by 384 inches — twenty-seven feet high, thirty-two wide. It was commissioned as part of SFMOMA's new art commissioning program around the museum's 2016 expansion and reopening, and it debuted Labor Day weekend, September 2, 2017, as the first work to occupy the atrium's mammoth walls since the new building opened. It entered the collection that same year as a gift of Helen and Charles Schwab, and it has been hanging there ever since — originally announced for three years, still listed as "Ongoing" on SFMOMA's website nine years later, free to anyone who walks in.
Mehretu was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; her family moved to the United States in 1977. She is famous for a kind of abstraction that behaves like an archive: architectural renderings, maps, aerial grids, and news images enter the work as fragments and come out the other side as weather — turbulent, calligraphic, unreadable at a glance and unbearable up close. In 2005 she won the MacArthur Fellowship, the "genius grant," for what the foundation called "visually compelling excavations of multiple epochs and locales." HOWL is the largest excavation she has ever attempted. Each canvas is bigger than Leonardo's Last Supper. Together, the two are bigger than Michelangelo's Last Judgment. As SFMOMA's curator Gary Garrels put it: "It's a historic scale — it's not typical of the work of our own time. Even the largest paintings of the Abstract Expressionists were nowhere near this scale."
The easy reading is landscape: the American West, vast and luminous. But Mehretu has a sentence that kills the easy reading, and she said it on camera while making this work: "There is no such thing as just landscape. The actual landscape is politicized through the events that take place on it. And I don't think it's possible for me, in general, to ever think about the American landscape without thinking about the colonial history — and the colonial violence — of that narrative." These are not paintings of the West. They are paintings of what the West cost.
The 19th century: going westward
When Mehretu first stood in the empty atrium — she visited San Francisco several times before starting — she found herself thinking about the national parks and the Hudson River School: Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt. "They really encapsulate that idea of going westward," she said. The 19th-century landscape painters gave America its founding visual myth: a continent of sublime emptiness, waiting. Waiting for whom was the part they left out.
Mehretu puts the left-out part back in. The base layer of HOWL includes distorted 19th-century depictions of the West, and her own summary of what those pictures omit is blunt: "Just prior to emancipation, Native Americans of the Sierras and the western frontiers were completely annihilated by this expansionist project." SFMOMA's description of the commission names the engine underneath the myth: "the competing impulses of annihilation and preservation at the heart of 19th-century westward expansion." Annihilation and preservation — the West was preserved by being emptied, and emptied in the name of being preserved. The national park and the massacre are the same project, and the paintings hold both at once, the way the country does.
The Bay Area: strata
The commission is site-specific in more than its dimensions. SFMOMA asked Mehretu to think about this place, and she layered the Bay Area's own history into the work: in the museum's words, "how the Bay Area's history of colonialism, capitalism, class conflict, social protest and technological innovation have transformed the social and physical landscape." Five strata, and you can feel them as geology in the paintings — the mission system under the Gold Rush under the Beats under the microchip under the protest march, each one half-erased by the next. A landscape, in SFMOMA's phrase, "continually reshaped by physical movement and struggle." San Francisco likes to tell its history as a series of reinventions. Mehretu paints the reinventions as sediment: nothing disappears, it just gets painted over, and the old layers show through like bruises.
2014–2016: the base layer
Before a single brushstroke, there was Photoshop. Mehretu merged sweeping landscape images with photographs of contemporary street protests — the demonstrations that followed the fatal police shootings of Black men, the race riots, the sirens and the flames — blurred them into color fields, inkjet-printed them onto the enormous canvases, and sealed them under acrylic. "The sirens and the flames of race riots was a way to embed the paintings with DNA," she said, "so that I could respond from a deeper place." Then she attacked the surface with everything she had: brushes, spray paint, screen printing, thick luminous layers of paint and ink, and erasures — whole passages scrubbed back down to the ghost layer and built up again. The result is a palimpsest you can fall into. Stand close and you start seeing things that may or may not be there: a horizon line, a crowd, a plume of smoke. The painting neither confirms nor denies. It withholds the way history withholds — the record is there, but you have to want it.
November 2016: the miasma
Mehretu made her first marks on the canvases in the days right after the November 2016 presidential election. It was shock, she said, that moved her to rapid action — and the "miasma" of the moment worked its way into what she called her improvisational language of "roiling calligraphic brush strokes and erasures." She had set out to paint the West; the country interrupted. "These are my most American paintings," she told the New York Times, and she meant it as both claim and question: what does it mean to make an American landscape — to love the light on it, to know the blood in it — right now? The works, she said, "are trying to make sense of where we are in our country right now." Nine years later, standing between them on the staircase, the question hasn't aged a day.
2016–2017: the church in Harlem
You cannot paint two 27-by-32-foot canvases in a normal studio, so for fourteen months Mehretu moved her practice into a decommissioned church in Harlem — a vaulted neo-Gothic nave, the only space she could find big enough to hold them. She worked from a mechanized lift, suspended in midair, finishing the upper reaches with what Garrels called "some very big, very long brushes." It was, by every account, the most physically demanding work of her career. It was also collaborative in a way her studio work rarely is: her friend Jason Moran, the composer and jazz pianist, would come by and play while she painted, and the two treated the process as an improvisation — his markings in sound, hers in ink, each responding to the other. The paintings are full of erasure, and erasure in jazz is called leaving space. Stand still long enough and you can feel it: passages where the surface goes quiet, thins out, lets the ghost layer breathe, before the marks come crowding back in.
The atrium: 1997–2017
Mehretu is the third artist to take the atrium walls. Sol LeWitt was first, in 1997; Kerry James Marshall painted murals for the space in 2008. The lineage matters because the room is a difficult one — the cylindrical hollow at the heart of Mario Botta's original 1995 building, the columns, the oculus — and each artist has had to decide whether to fight the architecture or use it. The local press, reviewing HOWL, mostly complained: the columns block the view, no sight line is clean, the paintings' panoramic ambitions are denied by their home. It's a fair complaint, and it misses the point so completely it circles back around to being interesting. A panoramic view of America is exactly what the 19th century promised and exactly what Mehretu refuses to deliver. You want the whole West in one clean sight line? That was Bierstadt's trick. She makes you walk for it — up the stairs, behind a column, across the bridge — and every partial view is a different painting. The country doesn't resolve. Neither does the room.
Abstraction as record
There is a term critics use for what Mehretu does — "social abstraction" — and HOWL is the monument case for it: every abstract mark carrying conceptual and political weight, the canvas a place where architecture, protest, and geology share the same skin. She calls the results "visual neologisms," new words for what language can't hold: "to address when language isn't enough." Which is also a description of what the atrium asks of you. You came in for free, on your way somewhere else, and now you're standing on a staircase inside a painting of your own country's unfinished business, and there is no wall text long enough to tell you what to feel. That is the commission working as designed. The museum didn't buy decoration for its lobby. It bought a mirror the size of a building.
Go back down to the atrium floor and stand at the foot of the stairs, between the two canvases, and let them do the last thing they do. Twenty-seven feet up, the marks thin into light; at eye level, they crowd and tangle like a city seen from a plane that's losing altitude. Somewhere in the underpainting are the flames. Somewhere under those are the Sierras. The paintings don't ask you to choose between the sublime and the violent. They insist — the whole twenty-seven by thirty-two feet of them, twice over — that they were always the same picture. 🌁
Timeline — Julie Mehretu
1970 — born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
1977 — family moves to the United States
1992 — BA, Kalamazoo College, Michigan
1997 — MFA, Rhode Island School of Design
2005 — MacArthur Fellowship
2016 — commissioned by SFMOMA for the atrium walls
November 2016 — first marks on the canvases, days after the US presidential election
2016–2017 — paints the diptych in a decommissioned church in Harlem
September 2, 2017 — HOWL, eon (I, II) debuts, Labor Day weekend
September 14, 2017 — artist talk, Phyllis Wattis Theater, SFMOMA
2017 — enters Collection SFMOMA (gift of Helen and Charles Schwab)
2019–2021 — mid-career survey: LACMA, the Whitney, the High Museum, the Walker Art Center
2026 — still on view, Floor 4 atrium, listed as "Ongoing"