Some paintings you look at; Julie Mehretu’s ‘Epigraph, Damascus’ you enter. The monumental work — layers of ink, paint and printed imagery mapping a city in flux — anchors ‘Unsettling the City,’ a new Saint Louis Art Museum exhibition running November 6, 2026, through August 15, 2027.
Mehretu, the Ethiopian-born MacArthur ‘genius’ and one of the most celebrated painters alive, builds her vast canvases like weather systems of marks: architectural drawings, maps and gesture swirling into meditations on place, migration and crowd. Seen at full scale in SLAM’s galleries, ‘Epigraph, Damascus’ rewards the slowest looking in the building — step close and it dissolves into calligraphy; step back and a whole metropolis reassembles.
It is the museum’s long-view exhibition of the season: plan time, and revisit.
‘Unsettling the City’ is at the Saint Louis Art Museum, 1 Fine Arts Drive. Details at slam.org.
