Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Papermaking, sculpture, textiles
Website: jagoodman.com
Julia Goodman was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and earned a BA cum laude in International Relations and Peace & Justice Studies from Tufts University in 2001. After moving to the Bay Area, she began making paper in her backyard in 2003 while taking classes at Santa Monica College, then completed an MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2009. She has lived and worked in Berkeley, California for many years, and is represented by Euqinom Gallery in San Francisco.
Goodman has received significant institutional recognition for her practice. In 2020, she was selected for the Women to Watch Award by the San Francisco Advocacy for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and her work was featured in Paper Routes—Women to Watch 2020 at NMWA in Washington, D.C. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, DePaul Art Museum (Chicago), Google, and Recology San Francisco. She has held residencies at the JB Blunk Studio (Inverness, CA), Recology San Francisco, The Space Program SF, the Salina Art Center, Dieu Donné Paper Mill (New York), and the Eames Institute in Petaluma. She has taught papermaking at California College of the Arts and served as a Visiting Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary MFA Program in Book and Paper at Columbia College Chicago.
Her debut solo museum exhibition, Unimaginable Units of Time, opened at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in September 2025. She has received multiple nominations for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA Award and nominations from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and Fleishhacker Foundation’s Eureka Fellows program.
Goodman works primarily in handmade paper, reimagining centuries-old Western rag papermaking traditions by gathering and transforming discarded bedsheets and T-shirts collected from family, friends, and thrift stores. She tears fabric by hand—an act that echoes the Jewish mourning practice of kriah—then pulps and presses the material into hand-carved wooden molds and against found surfaces such as brick walls and concrete. No dyes or pigments are added; color emerges entirely from blending pulps of differently hued fabrics. The resulting works are low-relief sculptures that retain traces of their textile origins: the warmth of worn cotton, the ghostly impressions of hands, folds, and seams.
Her practice is deeply autobiographical and rooted in feminist histories of domestic labor. Works chart cycles of grief, pregnancy, caretaking, and recovery—often using cyclical natural phenomena like lunar phases as organizing structures. Goodman has described her papermaking as “a study in how we fall apart, expose our hearts, heal, and come back together.” The scale of her work ranges from intimate wall-hung pieces to sprawling, time-based accumulations pressed daily over months or years, making duration and embodied repetition central to her formal vocabulary.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.