Julie Shapiro – September Artist-of-the-Month

Julie Shapiro Artist Statement

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. Many of these pieces in particular are strongly inspired by the geography that surrounds me; the experiences and perceptual relationships are an essential source for my work. 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 theworld are what trigger ideas and drive my practice.

Julie Shapiro works between painting, drawing, printmaking and constructing with paper. Her abstract work reflects experiences within her surroundings and a variety of other occurrences. The combining of control and accident and the unique possibilities of material and color within each medium is essential.
Her art has been shown in galleries including the Painting Center, NYC, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, NYC, Francine Seders Gallery, Seattle, Pollock Gallery, SMU, Weatherspoon Museum, Drawing Center, NYC, NY Satellite and Cleveland Print fairs and more locally at the Carrie Chen Gallery, Great Barrington, MA, Five Points Art Center, Torrington, CT, LabSpace, Hillsdale, NY and the Monterey Library.
Shapiro has received Pollock Krasner and Martha Boschen Porter grants, and residency fellowships at Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Redline Milwaukee, Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Yaddo. Her work is included in numerous collections.
Julie received a BA in Art from UC Santa Cruz, an MFA from Yale School of Art, and attended the Yale Summer School of Art, Norfolk, CT. She taught at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, and has participated throughout the country as a Visiting Artist and panelist. She is a member of NYArtist Circle and the artist collective Pell Lucy.
Julie Shapiro was born in Stockbridge and before her family’s move to California, she attended the Austen Riggs preschool and went to kindergarten at the Stockbridge Plain School. She was a frequent visitor to the Stockbridge
Library. Her father, David Shapiro, worked at Austen Riggs. Her mother, Gerry Shapiro, continued her involvement in the arts, helping to design, and teach classes at the Austin Riggs Shop/Lavender Door, as well as designing several book
jacket covers for Erik Erikson. Julie Shapiro now resides in Monterey, MA.

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