Julia Vogl
Visual Art
About Julia
Julia Vogl is American and British with an international practice. She makes social sculptures and installations that engage with sites and colourfully form communities. Her work primarily focuses on what things do we, as humans, share and what makes us distinct. She has been commissioned by JArts, the Tate, ITV, Facebook, Hull 2017 City of Culture, and recently, the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History. Winner of the Aesthetica Art prize in 2011, Julia has given a Ted X talk and had her work recognized by American for the Arts Public Art in Review for 2012, 2016, and 2019. All her works aim to represent the individual that participates as well as the collective, as beautiful installations that foster a greater conversation.
How You Can Work Together
“I have a manifesto that really is my motivation for most of my diverse works: the artwork must respond to site or community; the artwork must involve or engage others; the artwork must employ a strategy of decor. My works are about reflecting individual and collective voices and making something beautiful and accessible.”
Discover Julia’s Work
Inspired by the Jewish holiday of Passover, this public artwork engaged 1,800 individuals across 27 locations in the Greater Boston area (from City Hall to Conservatory Lab School in Dorchester to the Peabody Essex Museum), asking them to reflect and share their views on freedom and immigration. Every circle in the artwork represents an individuals answers to 4 questions. Additionally 44 audio interviews about immigration stories were integrated into the installation. Located at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Boston Common, MA and commissioned by JArts, Julia’s creation was recognized in 2019 by the Americans for the Arts Public Art Network.
Read more about this work here.
This experimental traveling work aimed to create a dialogue between the pedestrian and the online concerned citizen. Trying to uncover the future of protesting, this work was inspired by Occupy Wall Street and artists like Gillian Wearing. It aimed to engage the everyday person, asking individuals who passed by on the street: “If you protested for or against something, what would it be?” Each person was photographed and assigned a color to their message, and the photo was titled by location, protest message, and color. Images were then uploaded online to inspire a larger dialogue. A limited edition book with was published in 2016 featuring 279 of these photographs, and the cover served as a protest sign to incentivize the continuation of the project.
Commissioned by the Facebook AIR program with the intention to form a portrait of their community, this project was an interactive installation made up of data shared by staff at the London Facebook office. Through a fun stamping and disc laying game, 170 individuals shared their lifestyle likes, zodiac birth year and how they take their tea. The data was then used to create an 11×3 M wall installation made up of painted discs and string for the entire office to review. This mural, like much of Julia’s work, reflected the individual and the collective simultaneously. The key invited newcomers to identify and place themselves in the mural, too. The work, although static, continues to invite conversation and connections in the community.
Watch a short film about the project here.
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