Julie Ault

Julie Ault is an artist, curator, and editor who was a cofounder of Group Material, a New York-based artists' collaborative that has produced over fifty exhibitions and public projects exploring relationships between politics and aesthetics.

Artistic practice

As an artist, Ault works both individually and collaboratively with the artist Martin Beck for their contextual research projects. Their method can be regarded as an extended form of cultural praxis deriving from a general interest in the conservation and presentation of knowledge and culture. It questions the ways cultural economies present themselves, the conditional changes they undergo and to what extent they initiate a potential move. It is questions like: How does the presentation of history and the past shape the image of the present? Which aspects of cultural practices are (deliberately) kept in the shadows of official historiography and why?

Ault's and Beck's projects have been exhibited internationally, including the show Installation at Secession (Vienna, 2006), Social Landscape at the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC, 2004) and Outdoor Systems, indoor distribution at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin, 2000. They also produce exhibition designs, most recently for X–Screen: Film Installations and Actions of the 1960s and 1970s at mumok - The Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna Austria, 2003.

Publishing

Recently, Ault has edited several books on arts and artists, with a specific focus on the New York City art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Her most recent books include a monograph she edited on the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and a major publication on the art of Sister Corita, which received an extensive review on the group blog Design Observer.

Teaching activities

Ault has taught at the École Supérieure d'Art Visuel in Geneva, UCLA, the Rhode Island School of Design, CalArts, the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, Malmo Art Academy at Lund University, and the Cooper Union. In 2006–07 she taught at the Jutland Art Academy in Århus, Denmark by way of DIVA, the Danish International Visual Art Exchange Program.

Personal life

Ault married photographer Andres Serrano in December, 1980. Serrano referenced Ault as his "first wife" in a 2012 interview.

Exhibitions

• "Afterlife: a constellation", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, 2014
• "Macho Man Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault", Artists Space, New York, NY, 2013
• Installation, Secession, Vienna, 2006
• Information, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, NY, 2006
• Old News, LACE – Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA, 2005
• Points of Entry, for the City University of New York (CUNY), Queens, New York, 2004
• A Small Look at Giganticism, 2004
• Social Landscape, at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, 2004
• Outdoor Systems, indoor distribution at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin, 2000
• Billboard: Art on the Road, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art – MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, 1999