Julie Shapiro

Born in Massachusetts / Works in Monterey, MA

BIO

Julie Shapiro is an artist working in painting, printmaking, drawing and collage. She has exhibited her work in museums and galleries in New York, Seattle, Dallas, the Berkshires and other locations in between. Her abstract work reflects her experiences with her surroundings, and a wide variety of occurrences and visuals that cross her path. Her interest in the combining of control mixed with accident and the unique possibilities of material and color within each medium is essential to the development of individual pieces.

Shapiro has been the recipient of grants and residencies including a Pollock Krasner Grant, most recently a Martha Boschen Porter Fund Grant and residencies that include Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Connecticut Center for Printmaking. Her work is included in public and private collections. Julie Shapiro currently lives and works in Monterey, MA. Originally from nearby Stockbridge, MA, she grew up in Santa Monica. She received her BA in studio art form University of California, Santa Cruz, attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art, and received her MFA in painting/printmaking from Yale University. She taught and received tenure at SMU in Dallas, TX and subsequently taught at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. She has been a guest artist and critic at schools throughout the country.

You'll like Julie if: you like searching for the order within the commotion

Process through material is essential in my work as I move back and forth between painting, drawing, printmaking and constructing with paper. Each medium offers a different resistance, palette, surface and space, and each is open to different tools. The mashing of accident and control encourages the reexamination and self-critique that is ongoing in my working method. The work is strongly inspired by the geography that surrounds me; the experiences and perceptual relationships are an essential source. I find in the landscape and look beyond to occurrences of the new within the familiar, the irregular within the regular, the unexpected within the assumed, shifts as form and color meet up, cross or collide. My gathering of information is broad and varied, with parts and pieces entering the work in different ways. Within the making of an individual work, there occurs a shift that separates, selects and asserts through an open-ended process, bringing the experiential through materiality and formal constructs to resulting form. The consequence of the collisions of history, critique and my individual response to experiences in the world are what trigger ideas and drive my practice.