Julie S. Graham: Stack, Layer, and Arrange
TUFTS UNIVERSITY ART GALLERIES:
Tisch Family Gallery, Aidekman/Medford
August 22 – September 29, 2019
Thursday, September 5, 6-8PM, Opening Reception
Stack, Layer, and Arrange is the first comprehensive retrospective of Julie S. Graham (1947-2018), a Boston-based painter and beloved instructor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts. Throughout her long and varied career, Graham was consistently preoccupied with architecture, space, and the incidental alignments of shapes. She drew from the urban and natural landscapes she inhabited, paying close attention to details like corners, surfaces, and walls. She was curious about how lines intersected and forms fit together, motifs that she translated into her art by stacking, layering, constructing, and arranging. Her method of composition was spirited and unexpected, juxtaposing opposite forms—small and large, horizontal and vertical—in seemingly fortuitous relationships. Color increasingly played a central role in her later work, with small dabs, stripes, or spots of hot pinks in contrast with cool blues and greens. Including artworks from the entirety of Graham’s career, and bringing together a wide variety of disparate mediums from painting, sculpture, drawings, and photographs, this exhibition examines how Graham’s spatial and architectural inquiry evolved to produce structurally intriguing, colorfully zesty, and geometrically contingent works of art.
Guest curated by Martina Tanga.
Image: Strata 3, 2012, acrylic, speckle and canvas on panel.
PRESS:
10 Art Exhibitions Worth Catching This Fall, WBUR
Pamela Reynolds, “At Tufts, Julie S. Graham Retrospective Celebrates An Artist’s Long Career,” The ARTery, August 19, 2019.
Martina Tanga 