Julie Green: First Meal (online viewing room)

About

First Meal is an ongoing painting series by Julie Green started in 2018. It embodies themes of collective memory, loss, and social justice that are at the forefront of Green’s oeuvre. Works in the series depict first meals eaten by wrongfully convicted persons after leaving prison, created from stories generously provided by the wrongfully convicted and the Center on Wrongful Convictions, Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University (unless noted otherwise). Proceeds from the sale of work is shared with the organization that helped secure the individual's release.

Please note that a password is required to access the online viewing room. Go to upforgallery.com/visit-first-meal and register to recieve the password. Registration information is confidential and will not be shared with third parties or saved in any systems.

First Meal aims to stimulate thinking about the system of incarceration. We all have food in common, and Green encourages viewers to identify with the newly released as a basis for thinking through our system of criminal justice, and to develop a more thoughtful public conversation about its uses, abuses, and inequities.

Works from the First Meal series have been featured by several publications, including Rolling Stone, NPR, Eater and the LA Times.

Julie Green often combines humble materials or techniques with art historical traditions. Half of each year, Green works on The Last Supper, an ongoing project about capital punishment in the United States. The project’s most recent iteration exhibited, along with works from several major series, in Julie Green: Flown Blue at the American Museum of Ceramic Art.

Green’s many accolades include the 2020 Presents Booth Prize at The Armory Show in New York, a 2017 Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts from The Ford Family Foundation, the 2015 ArtPrize 3-D Juried Award, and 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Green lives in the Willamette Valley, Oregon, USA with fellow artist Clay Lohmann and their cat Mini.