Mehretu often incorporates maps into her work in order to interrogate how political boundaries affect individual and collective identities. For the artist, whose personal history has been shaped by periods of migration—from Addis Ababa to East Lansing, New York, Berlin, and beyond—this practice has allowed her to “make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment.”

In the mid-1990s Mehretu developed her own idiosyncratic system of mapping that includes “characters” such as marks, dots, circles, crosses, arrows, and barbells, and even organic forms like eyeballs, insects, wings, and beaks. She then placed these characters into compositions in which they resemble migrating masses or moving boundaries. As the work developed, she mixed the characters with others to make new clusters and cities, eventually saturating the surface with invented narrative.