Past Artist
Cheyenne Julien’s paintings and drawings are inspired by personal experience and memories, often depicting charged interiors and urban scenes. Her works depict what is closest to her—the people and places that have shaped her. While she may mine her own life for material, Julien seeks to create works that address urgent intersectional issues that connect the environment, gentrification, race, and generational trauma. Her works can be at once seemingly everyday and moving. A small painting depicting working from home is infused with the sleepless anxiety shared by so many at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic while White Noise (2020) is a careful still life of stacked cardboard boxes on a New York-street corner—the defiant remnants of a rogue fireworks celebration.
Biography
Cheyenne Julien
b. 1994, Bronx, NY
Based in New York.
Julien received her BFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. She has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York and Smart Objects, Los Angeles. Julien’s work has also been included in group exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Gladstone Gallery, Almine Rech Gallery, Karma, Mitchell-Innes and Nash, all in New York; The Harvey Gantt Center, Charlotte, NC; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise/Unclebrother, Hancock, NY; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm; and White Cube Bermondsey, London. Julien has also participated in artist residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center, the OxBow School of Art, and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She was awarded the Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) grant from the Bronx Council on the Arts in 2017 and the Florence Leif Award from RISD in 2016.