Jamian Juliano-Villani

Combining an affection for the full breadth of contemporary visual culture with an informed awareness of representational painting’s lengthy history, Jamian Juliano-Villani draws on a vast spectrum of references to produce uncanny and evocative images. Juliano-Villani was born in 1987 in Newark, New Jersey, and lives and works in New York. As the daughter of commercial silkscreen printers, she spent time as a child working in her parents’ factory, folding more than four thousand Pope John Paul II T-shirts in ninety-seven-degree heat while absorbing the influence of 1990s and 2000s mass-market print design. She attended the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Jersey, graduating with a BFA. While there, she was influenced by the institution’s historic ties to Fluxus, her studies with John Yau and Raphael Ortiz, and the Zimmerli Art Museum’s collection of 1970s Soviet conceptual painting. In 2013, Juliano-Villani presented her first solo exhibition, Me, Myself and Jah , at Rawson Projects, New York, showing paintings that incorporate characters from Ralph Bakshi’s film Cool World (1992). These works explore themes of race, identity, appropriation, and—in canvases such as Heat Wave (2013)—the collapsing of painterly hierarchies, while revealing the artist’s burgeoning admiration for the democratic nature of cartoons.