Painter and printmaker Julie Mehretu creates pictures that have been called “a new form of history painting.” Instead of conventional images that show people receiving and accepting moralistic lessons from above, Mehretu depicts vast spaces where the collective power of the multitudes takes over. She calls the small marks that populate her works—dots, dashes, squiggles and the like—“characters” or migrants who must move to accommodate globalization. For some, war forces relocation; others are compelled by dreams of a better life. Gathered together in communities, all garner the power to forge, create, overthrow, or otherwise act upon their environment. Landscape Allegories was Mehretu’s first experience in serial printmaking. Shortly before making it, she described her kinship with people who “rock the boat. Especially now, at this point in the super-rapid evolution of a geopolitical global situation consumed by and with American capitalism.” Mehretu’s landscapes map the many local narratives and bursts of energy that occur within social movements, physical migrations, and their effects upon our built and natural environments over time. (See the green architectural plans layered beneath nature in prints 4 and 6). For Mehretu, geography is biography. Her own history is stitched together from years spent moving from Ethiopia to Michigan, and then to Senegal, Rhode Island, and New York. The migrants within her works, who come together to form new communities, are what she calls “private utopian fighters,” wells of “self-determination and resistance” that create fresh narratives of historical weight.