JuliaWhitneyBarnes

Julia Whitney Barnes is an American artist working across cyanotype, watercolor, oil painting, ceramic sculpture, murals and site-specific installation. Born in Newbury, Vermont, she spent two decades in Brooklyn before moving to the Hudson Valley in 2015, and holds a BFA from Parsons School of Design and an MFA from Hunter College.

Barnes’s cyanotype paintings begin as camera-less photograms: flowers and plants grown in her own Hudson Valley garden are pressed, dissected and arranged, often at night, alongside cutout photographic negatives, then exposed under natural or UV light onto watercolor paper using the light-sensitive chemistry invented in 1842 by John Herschel and first put to artistic use by the botanist Anna Atkins. Once the cyan image is fixed, Barnes builds up the surface with multiple layers of watercolor, ink and gouache, fusing photographic directness with the tactile buildup of painting.

Her compositions typically fuse several plant species — weeds, cultivated flowers, rare specimens — into a single image, deliberately blurring precise botanical identification in favor of a familiar yet uncanny sense of a garden slightly outside of time. The work grew directly out of her move from Brooklyn to a century-old Hudson Valley house, marked by the births of her two children and the family’s tradition of planting a tree, with placenta as fertilizer, to mark each arrival.

Barnes has exhibited at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz; the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven; the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine; and Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Kent, Connecticut, among other venues, and has completed site-specific installations at the Albany International Airport, Brookfield Place/Winter Garden in Manhattan, and the Wilderstein Sculpture Biennial in Rhinebeck, New York. She has received fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Arts Mid-Hudson, and was awarded a permanent glass commission through NYC Public Art for Public Schools/Percent for Art.