Julie Blackmon

Born: 1966

Hometown: Springfield, MO

Lives and Works: Springfield, MO

Julie Blackmon Bio

About The Artist

The photographer Julie Blackmon's precisely choreographed domestic scenes apply an uncanny sense of balance, color composition, and proportion to households in various states of child-provoked disarray. The results hearken back to the work of 17th century Dutch painters like Vermeer and Jan Steen—a "Jan Steen household," after all, was once shorthand for a hectic home—and draw on the artist's own sprawling family: one of nine children, Blackmon has three of her own, and they often appear in her photographs.

Her work creates a world where children reign supreme in large modern gothic homes, and parents, when visible, appear as if caught in between the dream of adult and childhood. The scenes aren't so much surreal as it is exaggerated, mythic—with a minimal precision that compliments the chaos at hand.

Blackmon's photographs have won numerous awards from such institutions as the Santa Fe Center for Photography and Photospiva, and has appeared in group and solo exhibitions at galleries such as Robert Mann in New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography, among others. Her monograph, Domestic Vacations, was published by Radius Press in 2008.

Julie Blackmon Gallery Art

Galleries

Robert Mann Gallery, New York, NY
Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL
Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Gail Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA
Photoeye Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Robert Klein Gallery, Boston, MA

Julie Blackmon Permanent Collections

Select Permanent Collections

George Eastman House, Rochester, NY
Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas CIty, MO
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Midwest Photographers' Project, Chicago, IL
C/O, Berlin, Germany
University of Arkansas, Little Rock, AR