
Julie Alpert Treasure Drawing No. 1, 2019
Watercolor, colored pencil, ink marker, and liquid acrylic, on 140 lb Montval paper
21 × 21 × 1 inches
Presented by J. Rinehart Gallery
Tangled within Alpert’s Treasure Drawing series are things you would find in a little girl’s jewelry box. These drawings are filled with 1980’s keepsakes. Beads, rocks, erasers, and multicolored treasures inhabit these drawings to create a feeling of pleasant remembrances. Recurring themes in her work include her 1980s suburban Maryland girlhood, the thrill of anticipation, the distance between our realities and expectations, routine and repetition, and the nostalgia we imbue our collectibles with. Using a stream-of-consciousness process to make her drawings, she works out color, texture, and shape that eventually is brought into her large-scale immersive installations. Through this work, Alpert celebrates and examines the joy, confusion, and contradictions of the human experience.
Bio: Julie Alpert is a Seattle-based installation artist with a background in painting and drawing. She earned a BA from the University of Maryland and an MFA from the University of Washington. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Artist Trust, and Oklahoma Visual Art Coalition. Artist residencies include two MacDowell Fellowships, Roswell Artist in Residence Program, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, VCCA, and I-Park Foundation. Her work is in private and public collections including The Anderson Museum, Facebook Seattle, Ledger Coworking Bentonville, Seattle Public Utilities, King County Portable Works, and the Washington State Art Collection. She recently closed solo shows at Crystal Bridges Museum and ahha Tulsa and has an upcoming show at San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. Alpert has a major public art commission scheduled to open in 2025 at SeaTac Airport.