Julia Bland’s (b. 1986, Palo Alto, CA; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) work exists between painting and textile. By weaving, cutting, sewing, braiding, dyeing, and painting, she builds her compositions through an intuitive cycle of assembly and disassembly. Materials including canvas, linen, wool, and personal fabrics are pulled apart, reworked, and recombined, creating layered surfaces that retain traces of their previous forms and histories. Her woven and stitched constructions move between geometric structure and organic form. Light passes through open areas of the work while dense patterning anchors the surface, shifting spatial relationships between optical illusion and the physical presence.
She holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and earned an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Bland also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013.
Bland has been exhibiting at the Gallery since 2021. She has had solo exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield (2025); Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole (2023-2024); and Andrew Rafacz Gallery (2019). She has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including at the Concord Center for the Visual Arts, Concord (2025); Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse (2022); The Swedish Institute, Paris, France (2022); and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan (2019). Bland’s work is in the permanent collection of the Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY.