bio

Julia Schwartz (b. 1957, Pomona, California) lives and works in El Cerrito, CA. She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2005. Recent solo and group exhibitions include If Everything is an Outrage with The Binder of Women at Track 16 (Los Angeles), tenderly cradled and lavishly flung at Visitor Welcome Center (Los Angeles), and BODY HIGH at LABspace (Hudson, New York). Curatorial projects include States of Being at the Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA) and Black Mirror at Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles). Schwartz received the Foundation Prize for Painting from Peripheral Vision Arts in 2016. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including New American Paintings, Fabrik, Huffington Post, and The New York Times. In addition to her art practice Schwartz also writes and lectures about art; she was the original Arts Editor for Figure/Ground.

statement

I am a thing in a place, I am a face in a place.

The place is the moment, the situation, the existential situation- bad weather, bad dream, bad president, bad grief. (it can also be good but often bad)

The face is the human part of the work, the feeling part. If the face doesn't look back at you when you look at it then it doesn't work. But the face doesn't have to be a literal face, it's the feeling of embodied emotion or human (animal) contact.