Julie Wosk

Art and Photography​

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I am a painter, photographer, author, and museum curator, and I enjoy creating  visual  images of both the natural and the artificial world.   When I visited the Isola Bella in northern Italy a few years ago,  I was entranced by the white peacocks and beautiful gardens,  and I sometimes incorporate real-life peacock feathers in my mixed media paintings and photographs as in Peacock Lady  where  the pattern on

the feather  becomes the woman’s eye.

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I live in both New York and the Berkshires in Massachusetts, and for my  nature art, I have also enjoyed photographing the change of colors during the autumn season.  For my photograph  Solar Autumn in the Berkshires,  I placed  leaves on a cotton cloth I had created using stencils and solar paint.  The bright oranges and the white shapes of silhouetted faces capture   the vibrant colors during this time of year.

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My work also includes images of women who dance with joy,  seen in my mixed-media painting Dancing Delia made with a digital print and one of  my favorite mediums,  encaustic paint. 

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Images of Artificial Women

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I have also  long been fascinated by images of artificial women that seem alive.  It probably started when I was a young woman who had just gotten a master’s degree at Harvard and was working at Playboy’s corporate office in Chicago  as a writer in the press and promotion department. The photos of  air-brushed models in the magazine  seemed so synthetic but were intended to be alluring as well. Their authentic selves looked like they were camouflaged, waiting to be unmasked.

 

I started photographing mannequins that seemed to blur the boundaries between the artificial and the real,  as in my photo Marlene  of a mannequin that resembles the iconic film star Marlene Dietrich.  My paintings and  photographs frequently depict  these life-like mannequins as well as dolls and masks, and I sometimes incorporate digital prints of them into my mixed-media art using acrylic, oil paint, cold wax, and encaustic paint.

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I  also sometimes use these images for the covers of the books I have published, as seen in my photograph Bag Lady 2 of a mannequin I once spied in a Manhattan flea market peering from a bag.  I called her Bag Lady because she seemed like a packaged commodity but was a  provocative and mischievous female  as well.

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I  am a native of Evanston,  Illinois,  and my earliest art training was at the Art Institute of Chicago. Much later,  after I received a Ph.D. degree at the University of Wisconsin in Madison,  my career was as a tenured professor of  art history,  English, and studio painting at the State University of New York, Maritime College. It was during this time I discovered I enjoyed creating museum shows, and  I was the curator of the exhibit “Alluring Female Robots and Androids” at the New York Hall of Science.  I have also curated the exhibit  “Imaging Women in the Space Age”  of  female astronauts and space-age fashions and films.  It originated at the New York Hall Science and has since traveled to museums throughout the country.  For  information about the availability of this exhibit, contact Julie Wosk.

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I have exhibited my own  art and photographs in American galleries and museums, and am a member of the Guild of Berkshire Artists. I have also  written several books on the subject of women and technology  as seen in art,  robotics, literature, and films, including Artificial Women (Indiana University Press,  2024) and  my book  My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves (Rutgers University Press, 2015).

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My book Women and the Machine: Representations From the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Johns Hopkins University Press) highlights how artists, writers, and photographers have shown how women, historically,  have been haunted by gender  stereotypes but have also mastered the use of machines to demonstrate their expertise.  And my first book Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century showed how artists captured the excitement of the Industrial Revolution.

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For more information about my art, contact jwosk@sunymaritime.edu. For more information on my publications on art and technology,  see the Wikipedia page for Julie Wosk and juliewosk.com.

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