Julie Green Papers, 1983-2021

Julie Green was born in Yokosuka, Japan, in 1961. Julie's father, who was stationed in Japan with the U.S. Navy, returned to the U.S. when Julie was two and settled the family in Des Moines, Iowa. Though their childhood in Yokosuka was brief, Green developed an affinity with Japanese culture and art, returning there to reside for a year and a half in the early 1990s. Green explored this sense of being grounded in two cultures in a 1999 exhibition of paintings at the University of Oklahoma. This show, "Yoklahoma", blended together Green's cultural association inspired by their birthplace and their life in the American Midwest.

After high school, Green attended the University of Kansas to study art and earned a BFA there in 1983. They returned to the University of Kansas a few years later and completed a MFA in 1996. Green's teaching career began at the University of Oklahoma in 1997. In 2000, they joined the Art Department at Oregon State University as an assistant professor.

As an instructional specialty and a medium for their art, Green focused on painting. Their painted works occasionally incorporated elements of mixed media. One such piece, "The Hunting Season" was exhibited early in Green's career in 1986 and featured a painted sheet of woven paper attached by a string to a scrap of lumber. Green also worked on installation pieces for shows such as "Dead Dog Shrine" which they displayed at the University of Oklahoma in 1999. Over the course of their life, Green's artwork was exhibited in 42 different shows in the United States, England, and Japan.

Of Green's works that had garnered the most recognition was a series of paintings began in 2000 called the "Last Supper". Green used white porcelain plates as their canvas to depict representations of the final meal requested by death-row inmates before their execution. A blue mineral paint was chosen to portray the food and each plate contained the date of death and the state where the execution took place. Openly opposed to the death penalty, Green felt moved to illustrate the meals of condemned prisoners after reading newspaper announcements about periodic executions in Oklahoma that would include "menus" of what had been requested as the final meal. Passionate about the community building power of food and cooking, Green sought to use the symbology of food to encourage debate about what they perceived as a lingering injustice. In framing their art to communicate social concerns and ideas, Green credited the influence of Roger Shimomura, their major professor and mentor at the University of Oklahoma.

Vowing to keep the project going until "we no longer have capital punishment", Green continued to work on the Last Supper for 21 years. When they concluded the series in 2021, the total number of plates stood at 1000.

The Last Supper series received worldwide attention. Media sources as diverse as the New York Times, National Public Radio, Gastronomica, Ceramics Monthly, and Rolling Stone featured articles and interviews with Green on the plates and their message. First displayed at OSU in 2003 in a show of Art Department faculty works, plates from the Last Supper series have been extensively exhibited at a number of galleries, among them were: the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Bellevue Arts Museum, the University of Liverpool Art Museum, the University of Nebraska, the COPIA Museum of Art, Wine, and Food (University of California-Santa Cruz), and the Corvallis Art Center.

In 2018, Green began work on a series of painted plates that re-oriented the focus of the message embodied in the Last Supper. Through these new works, collectively called the "First Meal", Green represented food and stories associated with the first meal enjoyed after wrongfully accused death-row prisoners were officially exonerated and released. In 2023, the Oregon State University Press published the book First Meal which features a selection of plates from this series and details of stories behind Green's imagery in them.

Green received a number of awards and grants in support of their art. Among these included the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors, the 2015 ArtPrize 3-D Juried Award, an Oregon Arts Commission fellowship, and Hallie Ford fellowship.

Green died in 2021.