Last night, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted its annual gala, honoring artist Julie Mehretu—who in 2024 donated $2.25 million to the museum to ensure that visitors aged 25 and younger can visit the museum for free—alongside Whitney Board Chair Fern Kaye Tessler, and former Whitney Museum director Adam D. Weinberg. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, Mehretu’s painting, drawing, and printmaking practice examines the nature of contemporary existence through the relationships between geometric abstraction, figuration, and scale. She rose to acclaim in the late 1990s and early 2000s with spare paintings of fragmented shapes featuring architectural images of buildings or plans. But, as seen in her mid-career survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019, and later as the exhibition traveled to the Whitney Museum in 2021, her work came to grapple with legacies of displacement, protest, capitalism, and climate change. Related Articles Introducing Mehretu, Scott Rothkopf, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, recalled how the artist pulled him aside soon after he …