ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m interested in advocating for a new visual vocabulary to express the Black experience. My work explores the intersecting aspects of my identity while expanding the aesthetics of Black subjectivity in art. Rooted in the histories of the Black community, my practice engages with the past as it empowers our present, using archival materials and underrepresented narratives to reclaim and amplify our stories.
Beyond representation, I am interested in how to challenge my viewer’s gaze, transforming the act of looking into a dynamic interaction. Through materials like rhinestones and glitter, I create accents that dazzle and draw attention. By screenprinting glitter onto original photographs, I introduce a tactile complexity that shifts with distance and light, inviting moving engagement. My hand-printed photolithography onto fabric weaves together familial narratives of migration and identity, reinforcing themes of nostalgia and memory with a sense of delicacy.
My engagement with Black photo archives stems from a critical awareness of photography’s historical role in both oppression and empowerment. I reclaim the medium of photography as a tool for self-representation, ensuring that our stories are told through our own lenses. My work celebrates Black subjectivity and redefines the ways in which we see and are seen.
As a museum professional, I am passionate about representational justice in institutional spaces and fostering art engagement that challenges dominant narratives. Through my work in exhibition development, installation, object research, and interpretive strategies, I actively contribute to expanding access to underrepresented communities and narratives within the museum space.
ARTIST BIO
Julie Francois is a Haitian-American interdisciplinary artist and museum worker empowered by history as it relates to the present to drive her work and practice. Based out of New England, she holds her BFA from the School of the Museum Fine Arts at Tufts University and is currently working as an Art Bridges Fellow at the Mattatuck Museum, working to diversify museum leadership and curation.
Through the use of vibrant colors, textile details, and medium choices, Julie draws attention to expressions of Black joy, culture, and history to strengthen representational justice in the art world.
Julie’s work has been showcased regionally from Boston, to New York, and Pittsburgh. She’s brought together Tufts University Archive Center and The Africana Center to lead community workshops and has been celebrated in her community from exhibiting at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She’s been a guest lecturer at Quinnipiac University and has given artists talks at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and the Boston’s Youth in Charge, Speaker Series. In 2023, she was a recipient of the Anne E. Borghesani Grant and the Stephen D. Paine Scholarship from the Boston Art Dealers Association.