Julia A. Rooney
JULIA ROONEY (b. 1989, New York, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist. Her paintings, paperworks and installations explore the space between analogue and digital media, gesturing towards a world in which the two tenuously coexist.
Deeply concerned with the way social media is shaping patterns of thinking, making and communicating, Rooney consistently employs analogue modes of production both within and outside the studio. While rooted in painting, her practice often bridges other disciplines including papermaking and collaborative projects. Rooney's recent solo shows, Screen Shot (Jennifer Terzian Gallery, 2022) and @SomeHighTide (Arts+Leisure, 2021) featured a series of phone-sized and laptop-sized paintings installed both physically at the galleries, and digitally on her eponymous Instagram account, which she intermittently reactivates for site-specific projects as an ongoing form of inquiry. She is otherwise not active on social media. Rooney continued this research as a 2021-22 Happy and Bob Doran CT Artist-in-Residence through a partnership between Yale University Art Gallery and Artspace New Haven, culminating in the group exhibition Footnotes and other embedded stories. Rooney's ongoing series paper paper—made entirely of pulpified and re-formed newspapers—has been exhibited at The Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC, 2021), Real Eyes Gallery (Adams, MA, 2021), Kopeikin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA, 2019) and is currently on long-term loan at The Nature Conservancy in Connecticut. Using paper more tactilely, Rooney has been collaborating with her sister and poet, Anne Marie Rooney, since 2011 using the U.S. Postal Service as a medium for art production, distribution, exhibition, and mapping of their own movement between the cities of New York, New Orleans, New Haven and Baltimore.
In 2022, Rooney was an Artist-in-Residence at The Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans, LA) and was awarded a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Community Engagement grant for her project Greenspace, Greenscreen. Previous residencies and/or teaching fellowships include More Art’s Engaging Artists (New York, NY, 2014-15), The Yale Prison Education Initiative (2018), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s SU CASA (New York, NY, 2019), The Studios at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA, 2021) and The DNA Artist Residency (Provincetown, MA, 2020-22). Rooney received her BA in Visual & Environmental Studies from Harvard College and her MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art.