Siblings in Art and Life

• Thursday, September 19
• 12:30 PM
• Yale University Art Gallery, 3rd Floor
• 1111 Chapel Street
• MAP
• FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Deirdre Madden has always been fascinated, both in fiction, and IRL, with siblings, especially siblings like Theo and Vincent Van Gogh, whose relationship is intimately bound with art-making. Julia Rooney is herself an artist engaged in a long-term artistic collaboration with her sister, a poet. The two will discuss their mutual interest in exploring these complex relationship dynamics and how they can both help and hinder the artistic process.

Julia Rooney is a visual artist born and raised in New York City. Sensitive to the increasing power that digital, virtual, and augmented realities command, she creates paintings and site-specific installations grounded in real space, analog material, and the human body. Her work has been in solo and group exhibitions at Below Grand, Hesse Flatow, Freight+Volume, D.D.D.D., Band of Vices and The Weatherspoon Art Museum, amidst others. She has been awarded residencies and grants through The Joan Mitchell Center, Yale University Art Gallery, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, More Art, The Studios at MASS MoCA, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. In addition to her solo practice, Julia has been collaborating with poet and sister, Anne Marie Rooney, since 2011, often using the U.S. Postal System as a medium and a site for production and distribution of visual and text-based work. Their shared practice reclaims the unwieldy histories often held in found objects, texts, and images, transforming them into new works. In 2022, the Rooney sisters were awarded residencies at Soaring Gardens Artist Retreat, and in 2024 had their first two-person show, In the weather of it, at Below Grand. Rooney received her BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale School of Art.