Julie Speed, War Room (detail) (2018), Gouache and collage. Courtesy of the artist.
The El Paso Museum of Art (EPMA) presents Marfa-based artist Julie Speed’s most comprehensive museum exhibition to date, Julie Speed: East of the Sun and West of the Moon. The exhibition’s title, rooted in fantasy, refers as much to Speed’s own world and artistic process in Texas—where she has been making art for decades—as it does to the world in which her painted characters live.
The exhibition features nearly fifty works, many from the past five years and previously unseen, in oil, gouache, and collage. In her own words, Speed “experience[s] life as a series of irreconcilable juxtapositions.” Speed suggests the same through her work, painting surreal scenes collaged with Japanese woodblock prints and pages from illustrated textbooks and bibles.
“The exhibition highlights Julie Speed’s inexhaustible imagination, her consummate technique, and her devotion to both. Julie’s work masterfully represents the best of Texas art today,” says EPMA Director Dr. Victoria Ramirez.
For the exhibition, Speed has designed a site-specific, three-channel video and sound installation illuminating her process through images of her studio, close-ups of her finely detailed collages and paintings, and music. The exhibition is complete with an artist-designed, fully-illustrated catalog including an interview with the artist. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Support for this exhibition is proved by AT&T, Texas Commission on the Arts, and the El Paso Museum of Art Foundation. Educational programming for this exhibition is supported in part by Texas Women for the Arts.
Julie Speed: East of the Sun and West of the Moon is on view at the El Paso Museum of Art through April 7, 2019. For information, visit epma.art/Julie-Speed.
