Julie Anne Mann received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2001 and spent the following two decades working and exhibiting in New York, the Hudson Valley, Philadelphia, and internationally. She has since returned to the Pacific Northwest, where she lives and works. Her exhibitions during those New York years were not peripheral events: she showed at SmackMellon in Brooklyn, A.I.R. Gallery in New York — the oldest feminist cooperative gallery in the United States, founded in 1972 — the Noyes Museum of Art in New Jersey, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, the Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia, and the ISE Cultural Foundation in New York. She received a New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Grant in 2009, residencies at the I-Park Foundation in Connecticut and the Weir Farm Art Center, and was reviewed twice in Time Out New York. She held seven solo exhibitions in the US between 2009 and 2021, the most recent a solo at Roby King Gallery on Bainbridge Island.
The work is made from natural materials — but that description understates what is happening. Mann chooses materials for what they already mean before she touches them: devil’s claw pods with their hooked geometry, water chestnuts, cicada molts, wasp nests, slippery elm seeds stitched to linen with silver thread, Queen Anne’s Lace suspended in resin, walnut burl panels worked with silver leaf and cross-hatching to reveal the anthropomorphic shapes of Pacific Northwest trees. Some works are permanent; others are temporary installations, the botanical materials degrading back into the world they came from. The choice of medium is the argument — the push and pull between human nature and natural systems, the way botanical lore carries allegory, the way a cicada molt or a wasp nest arrives pre-loaded with meaning about transformation, labor, and time. In Meridian, The artist has arranged what appears to be dried plant material—possibly seed pods or fibrous natural matter—into a triangular form that descends like an inverted cone from a cream-colored upper register into a dark, oxidized ground. The pale material reads with a dense, almost feathered or hair-like surface texture that catches light irregularly, creating depth through its own physical dimensionality rather than through representation. By choosing decomposing or desiccated matter as the vehicle for a geometric abstraction, Mann produces a tension between the rational and the entropic—the form insists on mathematical clarity while the material itself enacts slow dissolution. In Traveler, Pale silvery material—possibly silver leaf or metallic paint—renders the root system and trunk in stark relief against a deeply textured walnut burl background of browns and blacks, creating sharp tonal contrast across the composition's horizontal expanse. The surface reads as a cross-section or excavation, with roots spreading laterally in anatomical detail while the trunk rises vertically, generating tension between growth patterns moving outward and upward. The choice of precious metal coating on wood suggests that rootedness itself—the invisible infrastructure of survival—deserves the formal value we typically reserve for rare materials and refined surfaces. In The Devil’s Sun, The work employs devil's claw pods—their characteristic curved, skeletal forms rendered in blackened tan and deep brown—arranged in concentric rings that radiate outward from a densely matted core of charred fibers and tangled material. The pods' hollow, hook-like structures create shallow shadows across the white ground, establishing a shallow picture plane while their graduated density suggests atmospheric recession toward a dense, almost impenetrable center. The choice of these naturally aggressive seed vessels, with their inherent tendency toward entanglement and proliferation, transforms the composition from geometric abstraction into something predatory—a vortex that pulls inward rather than expands outward.
The majority of my work is composed from natural materials using their inherent qualities to exemplify or allude to parallels found in human nature. Often the work will weave in botanical lore and allegories to address the relentless push/pull between humanity and the natural world. While some of these works are permanent, others are temporary installations due to the ephemeral quality of the medium in which they were created.
