Large-scale Mehretu print highlighted in close looking exhibition

ST. LOUIS, Sept. 29, 2026—An upcoming free exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum invites close looking at contemporary artist Julie Mehretu’s large-scale work “Epigraph, Damascus,” a 17-foot-long print that combines architectural renderings and abstract marks.

The exhibition, “Unsettling the City: Julie Mehretu’s ‘Epigraph, Damascus,’ ” is on view starting Nov. 6 with a public opening event from 4-8 pm featuring live music and gallery talks.  

Linear and gestural marks advance and recede across the sheets of paper, resulting in a composition that rewards viewing from both near and far. The work, which Mehretu made in 2016 in reference to the civil war in Syria, upends the representational possibilities of a city view, transforming the printed surface in a layered space of mark making.  

“Epigraph, Damascus” was the first project Mehretu, who was born in Ethiopia in 1970, did with renowned print studio Borch Editions in Copenhagen, Denmark. The six-panel etching, which SLAM acquired in 2017, was published as an edition of 16 and is also in collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others across the United States and abroad. 

“Unsettling the City” offers an opportunity to look closely at this one print. Featured alongside it are introductions to the space of the print studio and to the multitude of techniques involved in the print’s making. An adjacent gallery highlights a group of city views drawn from across geographies and time periods. The artists engage with places depicted from various points of view, capturing how both the built environment and human experience of the city produce visual markers that can transform space into place. 

“Building on Mehretu’s investigations of the structures of power that connect and divide us, this focused exhibition presents the city as a hub of interaction and activity,” said exhibition curator Clare Kobasa, SLAM’s associate curator of prints, drawings, and photographs.  

“Unsettling the City” is on view from Nov. 6 through July 11. Nov. 6 also marks the opening of two other presentations of contemporary art at SLAM: “Signs Under Pressure: Jasper Johns Lithographs,” which features a selection of prints by Johns from the 1960s and ’70s, and a new installation of art from the Museum’s postwar and contemporary art collection called “Art After 1945.”  

CONTACT: Molly Morris, 314.655.5250, [email protected]  

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