Tour Público en Español—Unsettling the City: Julie Mehretu's Epigraph, Damascus

Saint Louis Art Museum is hosting a Spanish-language public tour on Sunday, November 15, centered on the work of Julie Mehretu. The tour focuses on visual representations of cities, using Mehretu's Epigraph, Damascus as the starting point. If you're a Spanish speaker and you've spent any time in the museum's galleries, this is a good chance to hear a guided conversation about the work in your own language.

At the center of the tour is Epigraph, Damascus, a large-scale print that takes a city view and turns it inside out. Instead of a traditional cityscape, Mehretu treats the printed surface as a layered space for mark making, building up the image through overlapping lines and shapes. It's a piece that asks you to look at how we represent urban spaces—not as a static picture, but as something that's constantly being built over and rewritten. The tour uses that specific work to open up a broader conversation about how cities are visualized.

Mehretu is known for these kinds of expansive, layered compositions, and Epigraph, Damascus is a great example of her approach. The tour is designed to walk through those ideas in Spanish, so it's a welcoming entry point if you're more comfortable discussing art in Spanish than in English. It's a public tour, which means it's open to anyone interested in the subject, whether you've followed her work for years or you're just starting to look at it.

The tour takes place at the Saint Louis Art Museum in St. Louis on Sunday, November 15. Admission is free.