Julie Schenkelberg

Julie Schenkelberg grew up in the post-industrial landscape of Cleveland, Ohio. Her mixed-media installations start with furniture, dishware, textiles, and marble, combined with concrete, resin, and construction materials, to transform notions of domesticity, and engage with the American Rust Belt's legacy of abandonment and decay. Using the home as a playground for formal and conceptual subversions, the work aggressively disrupts cohesion within the physical sphere. Familiar furnishings rekindle memories or premonitions of collapse, suggesting both the utter destruction of war, calamities, or urban decay, but also the uncanny juxtapositions of fragile substances such as cloth and china, with industrial materials such as rusty metal, heavy concrete, and tool-made marks such as drilled holes and chain-sawed indentations.

Julie Schenkelberg received a BA in Art History at the College of Wooster, OH, and MFA at the School of Visual Arts, NY, with additional studies at SAIC at Oxbow, MI, Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art, France, and the Institute of European Studies, Vienna. Her large-scale installations have been displayed in solo exhibitions at Grunwald Gallery, Indiana University; Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, OH; The Detroit-Volterra Foundation, Italy; The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH; the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the University of Akron Meyers School of Art, Akron, OH; Beeler Gallery, OH; Plug Projects, MO; and UNTITLED Miami Beach, FL. Schenkelberg was a 2019 finalist for the Foundwork Artist Prize, and the Burke Prize of the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and the Knight Arts Challenge Grant in Detroit, MI. She won the 2014 ArtPrize Installation Juried Award, and has received four National Endowment for the Arts Grants, the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, and a Harpo Foundation Grant. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, Volterra-Detroit Foundation Residency, Italy, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE, Art Omi, Ghent, NY, Projekstom Normanns, Norway, the Red Bull House of Art, Detroit, MI, and SiTE:LAB, Grand Rapids, MI. Press includes Artforum, The New Yorker, PBS, Bloomberg, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Schenkelberg lives and works in Cleveland, OH.