Food, Fashion, and Capital Punishment

Julie Green’s Food, Fashion and Capital Punishment, her second exhibition at Upfor, weaves together several creative threads that have figured in the artist’s work for decades. The focal point of the exhibition is a series of paintings titled Fashion Plate that blend “high” and “low” technique and materials. As with her well-known, ongoing project The Last Supper, Green drew inspiration and patterning for the new work from traditional flow blue ceramics; but the mediums are acrylic and day-glow paint on gessoed Chinet brand paper plates.

Early work from the series debuted in the Hallie Ford Fellows Exhibition at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2017. Since then, Green has produced nearly 40 additional works. Fashion Plate offers a counterpoint to The Last Supper (which now comprises 800 plates) while sharing themes and formal elements. Since 2000, Green has spent half of each year painting the final meals of executed prisoners on found ceramic plates, a project that necessarily focuses on male experience. Interested in creating work from a more personal context, Green began Fashion Plate to explore overlapping themes of domesticity, decoration, food and social justice from a consciously female perspective, expanding personal narratives into a wider view of women’s experience.

Julie Green’s latest book project, Picnic Brownies Make Life Easy, for which she was awarded an Oregon Arts Commission Career Opportunity Grant, will launch on Saturday, June 30th at Upfor. This launch begins with an artist talk with Green and art critic Stephanie Snyder, John and Anne Hauberg Curator and Director of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College. This and all related events are free to attend and open to the public.

Julie Green (b. 1961 in Yokosuka, Japan) wanted to be a stewardess until age four, but became a painter instead. Green’s awards include a 2017 Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts from The Ford Family Foundation, a 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, the 2015 ArtPrize 3-D Juried Award, as well as a 2017 Career Opportunity Grant and 2016 Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. She has exhibited widely in the US and internationally, featuring in publications such as The New York Times, National Public Radio, Ceramics Monthly, Gastronomica and Prentice Hall’s 7th edition of A World of Art. Green is a professor at Oregon State University.