Blog
Current/Recent Exhibitions
2020 Tyler MFA Painting
Massey Klein Gallery
August 17-31
Last month, I had the pleasure of exhibiting one of my recent large scale pieces from the American Space series at Massey Klein Gallery in New York. The physical exhibition has come down, but you can view installation shots and even do a virtual walk-through on the gallery's website! (Above photo courtesy of Massey Klein.)
TSA_PDF 009: Sand Between my Teeth
curated by Adam Lovitz
September 1-15
Sand Between my Teeth is Tiger Strikes Asteroid's 9th printable exhibition, featuring work by Gavin Bartlett, Julia Clift, Paige Donovan, Loren Erdrich, Frankie Gardiner, Bambi Glass, Dara Haskins, John Mitchell, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, and Peter Williams.
TSA_PDF is a series of printable shows curated by members of the artist collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid. People are invited to download and print high-resolution images of the included works on their home printers for a pay-what-you wish fee. To learn more or make a purchase, visit TSA's website, and check out the New York Times write-up on this super inventive exhibition series!
CERTAIN GROUND is an online exhibition curated by Tausif Noor, with an accompanying essay titled "On Groundedness," featuring the 2020 Tyler MFA Painting graduates: Austen Camille, Julia Clift, Jay Hartmann, Kathryn Mecca, Alexandria Nazar, Chris Riddle, Olivia Sherman, Riley Strom, and Warith Taha. The project is the result of a year-long relationship between Noor and the cohort.
Drawings Sale
UPDATE: All of the drawings have found homes. Thank you to everybody who reached out, I appreciate your support! If you’d like to be notified about future mega-sales like this one, just send me an email and I’ll add you to my mailing list.
24 original works on paper for $25 a piece.
I've reduced the price of these works as low as I can--essentially the cost of materials and shipping--to make it possible for more folks to own and live with original art. I think it’s important! My hope is to spread some beauty in this dark time and foster human connection as we all cope with quarantine and social distancing. Each piece is mixed media on heavy watercolor paper and is 9" x 12", a standard size if you choose to frame. If you’d like to learn more about where the drawings are coming from, check out my last blog post.
To make a purchase, simply email me at juliaclift5@gmail.com with the numbers you’d like. Enjoy, and be well!
Drawing Through the Pandemic
The week of March 9th was a slow chipping away at all that structured my life as an MFA student. Classes moved online, my thesis review and exhibition became a question mark, and grads were ordered to leave their studios. It felt like my cohort community was evaporating without warning or ceremony; I felt heartbroken and entirely disoriented. COVID-19 had only recently touched down in the U.S., and the reality of its danger hadn’t yet sunk in—nor had the reality of a global economic crisis.
Two experiences that week stand out from the haze. On Thursday, I visited an older artist’s home studio. I saw her magnificent, abstract drawings and paintings spanning decades and two coasts, as well as the precious works she’d collected over the years from friends. Secondly, on Friday, one of my professors was making harmonograph drawings in the school lobby with any one who chanced to pass by and show interest. I stopped to make one and was quickly lifted by the perfection of the machine, the beauty of the drawings, and the persistence of my mentor’s rational mind amidst the insanity of the moment. In both cases, I felt healed by a generosity coiled like a spring within thoughtful, beautiful art.
I’ve always been skeptical of how useful we artists really are to society. I think a good deal about whether art should serve as a call to action in troubled times, and if rather than being “moving,” art should move its viewers to act. But my experiences the week of March 9th gave me new perspective.
Since March 17th, I’ve spent a good portion of each day working on abstract drawings in a cleared-out corner of the house. It’s important to acknowledge my privilege, here. No one in my family is sick, I have a stable home and a nourishing partnership with my husband, and we have a little bit of savings. Not all artists have the capacity to make work right now, and I count myself blessed. The drawings make use of random, leftover materials that I distractedly grabbed from my studio before the school locked its doors, or that I happened to have lying around the house. This includes a few colors of ink and dye, some green latex house paint, and a bit of half-dried orange acrylic. Fortuitously, I had a stack of 9” x 12” watercolor paper in the house, leftover from a workshop that I taught this fall with poor attendance. These are parameters born of necessity, stores are closed and money is tight. But it feels poignant to work with materials that I don’t have control over, to figure out how to make use of what’s at hand (as artists have done for centuries). In 2016, at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, Brian Eno gave a lecture where he talked about art as a way for people to rehearse the critical life skill of negotiating between control and surrender, or going with the flow. I think that’s right. Drawing through the pandemic creates space for me to process what’s happening, while it exercises the mental faculties that we all need to face this moment—to be nimble, to control what we can and accept what we cannot.
College Art Association Conference 2020
Going to the CAA Conference this year? Stop by Salon C-6 at 2 PM on February 13th to watch me spend 7 minutes defending beauty within contemporary art. See the abstract and more details below…
A CASE FOR BEAUTY:
A Case for Beauty presents a critique of Arthur C. Danto's 2003 book, The Abuse of Beauty, from the perspective of a working artist and art educator. Danto's argument that a work of art’s meaning can never be fully determined outside its social political context, that “aesthetic attributes do not stand alone,” bears massive relevance today. However, Danto’s implication that artists cannot wield beauty in service of social progress feels short-sighted. The diverse practices of Nick Cave, Kerry James Marshall, and Joan Semmel offer just a few examples of how contemporary artists do employ beauty in works that pointedly address social politics. Beauty’s unique power to compel an audience to see and consider an image carries radical potential. Beauty today may act as a Trojan horse, a lure for transmitting to viewers the messages and questions that can inspire positive action.
