Julia Sherman is an artist living and working in New York.  Sherman mines folk traditions, canonical art history, feminist theory and a range of personal anxieties to create tableaus of fantasy, philosophy and interrogation. Her symbolic objects and aestheticized documentation interweave a type of autobiographical journalism obsessed with the story of making--rather than the sanctity of objects themselves.  Sherman is an alumnae of Columbia University MFA, The Mountain School of Art and Anhoek School.


In my life and work I am a committed student, observer, maker, and always an eager amateur. I insert myself alongside the complex cultural and creative practices of others, constantly renegotiating my role and testing the limits of collaboration. I follow a personal line of inquiry, destabilized by the reverberations of history, texts and contemporary culture. I draw from life, while employing abstraction, metaphor and conceptual thinking to the “real.” 

I initiate projects with a simple inquiry, moving from the secondary source to the first-hand experience in an effort to untangle and frame a problematic. This has taken the form of apprenticeship and collaboration with a cobbler, an orthodox Jewish wigmaker, an experimental composer and a young opera singer, and most recently I have been working with Benedictine Nuns to re-brand their line of beauty products. I am constantly evaluating the meaning and nature of participation, and thinking through the implications of my position as an artist/interloper, careful not to gloss over the complexities of social exchange and material production.

I am a conceptual artist unwilling to identify with a specific medium, but I am also a compulsive maker who is constantly questioning the value of my own production and the act of making as part of the human experience. My methodology causes epistemological ripples, as meaning is repurposed and craft and labor are re-contextualized.