Press

2019Julianne Swartz Interview, Studio International
Sculpting the Uncanny, Bomb Magazine
2018Wired for Sound: Julianne Swartz at Josee Bienvenu, Artcritical
Vasari Diary: Julianne Swartz, Munch Meets Schoenberg at the Met, and Artists Playing with Dolls, ArtNews
2017In Cambridge, an Inspiring Reason to Hold Hands, Boston Globe
The Shape of Sound, An Interview with Julianne Swartz, Sculpture Magazine
2016Wondering about Wonder, Boston Globe
Explode Every Day, MassMOCA
Whispers, Chants, Hums, Charlotte Observer
2015Julianne Swartz, Sculpture Magazine
2013Julianne Swartz, Art in America
Julianne Swartz, Sculpture Magazine
2012Works as Fragile as How we See Ourselves, Boston Globe
Julianne Swartz, ArtForum
Museum Previews 2012-2013, Art in America
Miracle Report, Phoenix Times
Exploring Miracles, Arizona Republic
Julianne Swartz: Gravity, New York Magazine
Julianne Swartz: Gravity, The New Yorker
Julianne Swartz at Josee Bienvenu, Art in America
2011New Art on the High Line, New York Times
Julianne Swartz, Bob Magazine
New Voices for the High Line, Art in America
An Alternative Moment, SOCO Magazine
2010Julianne Swartz, Sculpture Magazine
2009Julianne Swartz, ArtForum
2008Julianne Swartz, Sculpture Magazine
Julianne Swartz, The New Yorker
The Sound of Light, The Jewish Daily Forward
2007Julianne Swartz, The Village Voice
Julianne Swartz, Time Out New York
Paths: Real and Imagined, Sculpture Magazine
Humanizing Time, Rhizome
Julianne Swartz, New York Magazine
Julianne Swartz, The New Yorker
Julianne Swartz, ArtForum
2006Breaking Boundaries, Metro Life
Affirmation, Liverpool Biennial
Art that Speaks to You, The Daily Post
Julianne Swartz, Art in America
2005The Message is Pretty Clear, Winston-Salem Journal
Julianne Swartz, The New Yorker
Julianne Swartz, Frieze Magazine
Tend the Thread, Foarm Magazine
Julianne Swartz, ArtForum
Julianne Swartz, ArtNews
2004Julianne Swartz, Washington Post
Through a Tube Starkly: Connecting on the Bowery, The Villager
American Splendor, Time Out New York
Speculative Mechanics, Time Out New York
Exhibit Offers a Peek Inside the Lives of Outsiders, New York Times
Telephoning from Skid Row, New York Arts
The New Museum for Contemporary Art, The New Yorker
From da 'Hood to the Whitney, The Brooklyn Rail
2003Julianne Swartz, Sculpture Magazine
2002Julianne Swartz, Brooklyn Rail
Brooklyn!, Art in America
2001A Thread of Tolerance, The Patriot-News
Essays

Sebastian Smee

Most of Swartz's work is marked by a modesty that's in line with its feeling for human connection. It’s work that, ultimately, is about love, and about what Wallace Stevens called "the difference that we make in what we see." It can seem incomplete when first encountered - lacking a necessary component that’s hard to put your finger on - until you realize it is you. "What I lack is this me that you see," wrote Paul Valery, and the insight holds here: How you see Swartz's work draws attention not just to how you see, but how you are seen. Her aesthetic achievements are just as contingent, just as prone to fluctuation and reversal, just as fragile...

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Rachel Arauz

Swartz also invites gallery visitors to handle, listen and look - often in unconventional museum spaces. More subtly, her work employs them as spectators of interactivity, a less considered version of participation, yet one often crucial to the complete experience of some of her sculptures. These modes of interactivity combine with Swartz’s skillful transformation of simple, industrial materials to engage viewers with their own emotional history as well as the formal traditions of participatory art...

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Cassandra Coblentz

Julianne Swartz wants to let you in. She wants her audience to feel something, something she too has felt, she wants to connect. In her work, she offers up her own human vulnerability to reach her audience in a way that is at once comforting and unnerving: she taps into the private space of intimacy. She does so with a gentle confidence that is seductive and provocative, luring her audience in with a sensuality that comes dangerously close to the realm of the sentimental yet retains a distance that maintains objectivity and enables her to toy with her viewers' comfort levels, ultimately provoking them to question their own relationship to the notion of intimacy...

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Charles LaBelle

In other words, her work knows no bounds. In fact, it is devoted to boundlessness and to fluidity. Every attempt at containment is countered by an insistent rupturing, a preference for the playful destructiveness of leaks. Quietly worming their way into places they shouldn't go, Swartz' PVC piping, fibre-optic cables, wires, threads, lenses and tape collectively invade the body of buildings, spreading like indiscriminate infections...

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Tim Griffin

Light, like information, becomes a material to direct, manipulate and guide. And, in fact, the quality of light is transformed during its passage, as the fiber optic wires' mirrored interiors produce a strangely intense and diffuse optical texture, a nether worlds visuality-all in order to bring the intangible to the edge of materiality...

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Sharon Corwin

Julianne Swartz uses commonplace materials and simple technologies to create complex aesthetic situations. Her work challenges our preconceptions and expectations about art and asks us to see the world in new ways. Swartz's sculptures and installations are often purposefully low-tech in a high-tech world. Her materials, in fact, can seem quite mundane-scrap wood, PVC pipes, Plexiglas, Mylar, vinyl, mirrors-and far from the traditionally valorized materials of high art. Yet the seeming simplicity of Swartz's materials and technologies often belie a much deeper project...

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Ellen Pearlman

Sound and light are endemic to our daily experience, but remain essentially ungraspable. We know from engineering and physics that they break down into pulses and waves, but believe we can only hold pulses and waves if we make them into functional light bulbs or radios. Swartz describes their invisible, ephemeral quality as possessing "sensual presence," and believes we receive them through our senses. She delineates sculptural form by making sound and light more palpable to an individual's mode of interpretation, which means you can’t see them, but you can see the pathway of transmission...

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Patrick Callery

To make a macro-to-micro connection, Julianne Swartz's "viewing machines" transform the perspective of a room, the scene outside a window, the mess in a closet into a hazy, uncanny experience.She builds portals that project a reality that is no longer objective, impartial and evidential. A constructed image, like a photograph, but not frozen in time, a fictional and ambiguous event...

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