JULIE GREEN
FOOD, FASHION AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

June 7 – July 28, 2018
First Thursday opening June 7, 6:00 to 8:00 pm (artist present)
Artist talk with Stephanie Snyder and Julie Green, Saturday, June 30 at 1:00 pm (watch here)
Book launch for Green's Picnic Brownies Make Life Easy, Saturday, June 30 at 2:00 pm (buy a copy here)
First Thursday art walk July 5, 6:00 to 8:00 pm

THE WORK

For the artist’s second solo exhibition with Upfor, Julie Green weaves together several creative threads that have figured in their work for decades, focusing on a series of paintings titled Fashion Plate that blends "high" and "low" technique and materials. As with the well-known, ongoing project The Last Supper, Green drew inspiration from patterning for the work from traditional flow blue ceramics; but the mediums are acrylic and day-glow paint on gessoed Chinet-brand paper plates. The artist weaves in narrative elements that explore overlapping themes of domesticity, fashion, decoration, food and social justice from a consciously female perspective, expanding personal narratives into a wider view of women's experience and often balancing humor and earnestness. Each plate is marked with painstaking fingerprint facsimiles as backstamps.

Green continues to spend half of each year working on the widely-exhibited project about capital punishment, The Last Supper. Began in 2000 and now comprising over 700 plates, this project necessarily focuses on male experience. Interested in creating work from a more personal context, Fashion Plate offers a counterpoint to The Last Supper while sharing some themes and formal elements.

THE ARTIST

Julie Green (b. 1961 in Yokosuka, Japan) wanted to be a stewardess until age four, but became a painter instead. Awarded a 2017 Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts from The Ford Family Foundation, Green also received a 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, the 2015 ArtPrize 3-D Juried Award, a 2016 Fellowship and a 2017 Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission. Green has exhibited widely in the US and internationally, and featured in publications such as The New York Times, a Whole Foods mini-documentary, National Public Radio, Ceramics Monthly, Gastronomica, and 7th edition of A World of Art published by Prentice Hall. Half of each year, usually in winter months, Green works on The Last Supper, an ongoing project about the death penalty in the United States. Green lives in the Willamette Valley and is a professor at Oregon State University.