Julie Ault is an American artist, curator, and editor who was a cofounder of Group Material, a New York-based artists' collaborative that has produced over fifty exhibitions and public projects exploring relationships between politics and aesthetics. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellows Program grant, commonly referred to as a MacArthur Genius Grant, in 2018 in recognition for her achievements "redefining the role of the artwork and the artist by melding artistic, curatorial, archival, editorial, and activist practices into a new form of cultural production."
Artistic practice
As an artist, Ault works both individually and collaboratively with the artist Martin Beck for their contextual research projects. Their method can be regarded as an extended form of cultural praxis deriving from a general interest in the conservation and presentation of knowledge and culture. It questions the ways cultural economies present themselves, the conditional changes they undergo and to what extent they initiate a potential move. It is questions like: How does the presentation of history and the past shape the image of the present? Which aspects of cultural practices are kept in the shadows of official historiography and why? Ault's and Beck's projects have been exhibited internationally, including the show Installation at Secession, Social Landscape at the Weatherspoon Art Museum and Outdoor Systems, indoor distribution at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin, 2000. Together they also have produced numerous exhibition designs, including over two dozen shows for the International Center of Photography in New York between 2001 and 2004; X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions of the 1960s and 1970s and Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963–1987 for Mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Projekt Migration at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; and Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Publishing
Recently, Ault has edited several books on arts and artists, with a specific focus on the New York City art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Her most recent books include a monograph she edited on the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and a major publication on the art of Sister Corita, which received an extensive review on the group blogDesign Observer. In 2018 a collection of her writing was published as In Parts: Writings by Julie Ault.
Ault married photographer Andres Serrano in December, 1980. They divorced at an unknown point; Serrano referenced Ault as his "first wife" in a 2012 interview where he mentioned his current wife Irina Movmyga. Ault was born in Boston, MA. She currently lives and works in New York, NY and Joshua Tree, CA.
Exhibitions
"Nancy Spero: Paper Mirror", Museo Tamayo, Mexico City and MoMA PS1, New York, NY
