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.

Subsequent exhibitions in New York, London, Milan, Shanghai, and elsewhere have seen Juliano-Villani continue to produce paintings derived from a collection of visual material that she began accumulating in high school. Generating, in her words, “ephemera from ephemera,” she aims to elevate her subjects through selection and focus. Some paintings feature fragments of the artist’s writings or work by other artists such as Ovartaci (1894–1985), while others confront racial and sexual stereotypes with deliberate ambiguity.Juliano-Villani’s exhibition Try Explaining How You Feel, which opened at the Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway, in 2021, functioned as a loose examination of the United States’ history and self-image by reimagining the bold masculinity of Karel Appel and the aesthetics of Arte Povera according to a distinctly American point of view. In 2022, Juliano-Villani showed work alongside that of the late Mike Kelley at The Ranch in Montauk, New York, in an exhibition that revealed myriad direct and indirect resonances between the two artists’ work, including their shared predilection for abject and profane imagery. That same year, her paintings were included in Cecilia Alemani’s curated exhibition The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Biennale di Venezia.In 2021, Juliano-Villani opened the East Village gallery and project space O’Flaherty’s with her long-time collaborator Billy Grant, a founding member of the Dearraindrop collective, and Ruby Zarsky, from the pop-disco duo Sateen. In its first year of operation, the gallery exhibited work by Kim Dingle, Ashley Bickerton, Anthea Hamilton, Bobo, and Gelatin. An open call for its summer 2022 project, The Patriot, resulted in a display of more than a thousand works. Just as Juliano-Villani’s painting practice hinges on the recontextualization of myriad outside sources, so O’Flaherty’s shines a light on the work of colleagues and collaborators. The space functions as an important aspect of her ten-year collaborative practice with Grant and as an extension of both of their artistic practices.

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From the Quarterly

Touch of Evil