The Addis Ababa-born artist has long privileged an engagement with global current-affairs, both in her paintings and in the way she conducts her career. As this year’s surveys at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, and K21 in Düsseldorf demonstrated, her earliest abstract works were made of diagrammatic and cartographic motifs, referring to global power structures, while later works frequently took events in the news as their starting point – the invasion of Ukraine or the wildfires in the US West, for example. Mehretu’s influence extends beyond the studio, however: she continues to mentor artists and thinkers at Denniston Hill, the residency she cofounded just over two decades ago with longtime collaborators Paul Pfeiffer and Lawrence Chua in the Catskill Mountains, and when approached to design the BMW art car, she agreed only if the auto company would help launch the African Film and Media Arts Collective, a series of artist workshops she continues to devise with Mehret Mandefro, touring Cape Town, Dakar, Lagos, Nairobi, Tangier and Ouagadougou.