Inside the Making of Julie Mehretu’s BMW Art Car

BMW’s latest Art Car almost didn’t come into existence, says its creator, Julie Mehretu. “I actually tried to turn it down.”

It’s not that she wasn’t interested. The abstract artist has long been a fan of the program, which began nearly 50 years ago and has featured collaborations with such luminaries as Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Jenny Holzer, David Hockney, Alexander Calder, Cao Fei, Roy Lichtenstein, Esther Mahlangu, Jeff Koons, and Robert Rauschenberg. And she was honored to be chosen by an independent international jury of top curators and other art world leaders.

But she was stumped. “I didn’t know how to even approach the idea,” she says. “This was totally out of my imagination, painting a car.”

Attending a race with BMW changed her perspective. There, she witnessed the spirit of cocreation among the engineers, designers, drivers, and crew. This resonated artistically. “It’s about making dreams,” Mehretu says. “It’s fully about pursuing something in the imagination, and in physics, that is just about the possibility of what could be.”

Like its forebears, her Art Car uses as its “canvas” a BMW race car, in this case the automaker’s menacing M Hybrid V8. Mehretu’s design is an original work, inspired in part by her large-scale painting Everywhen, which employs her signature phantasmic cartographic symbols that pierce geopolitical orthodoxies surrounding race, colonialism, and power.

But the adaptive process wasn’t as simple as wrapping the car in the artwork. She wanted the vehicle to feel as if it transversed the painting, “as if the painting was a portal,” appearing “like it’s glitching” when still but a “fluid blur” when moving.

Opportunities to view the work at speed will arise in June, when the car participates in the famed 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in France. There, on the track, it will “earn its spurs, its badge of honor,” as a race car, says Thomas Girst, BMW’s head of cultural engagement, before entering BMW’s permanent collection.

Previous artists have had similarly amalgamative experiences. “It’s past the scale of just playing an instrument or making an arrangement and playing it. It’s being able to have that performed by an orchestra,” says Koons of creating his 2010 car, an M3 GT2 covered in eruptions of bright color. “It’s like being able to participate in something that is conducted.”

This spirit of collaboration will persevere through 2025, when Mehretu cohosts a pan-African artistic workshop series aimed at communally producing, as she says, “indigenous, individual, local content, generated and made by and for Africans.” The outcome of these gatherings will be shown, along with her Art Car, at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in Cape Town late next year.

“It’s going to be an abstract caravan,” says Koyo Kouoh, executive director of Zeitz MOCAA, of the nine-month, eight-city project. “Julie being such a powerful abstract artist, we needed to construct the idea of the caravan itself in ways that make it more interesting, more challenging, more generative.”

The Art Car could have disruptive reverberations in Mehretu’s own work as well. “Julie says herself that her Art Car is a shout-out to Frank Stella,” says Girst of Stella’s scrawl-pierced graphpatterned 1976 3.0 CSL. “I always tell her that Stella was a two-dimensional artist before his Art Car, and it turned him into a three-dimensional artist.” The pioneering minimalist, who died in May, “became a sculptor,” Girst says, “after creating a BMW Art Car.”