Artist Spotlight – Judy Youngblood

William Campbell Gallery is pleased to spotlight the work of gallery artist Judy Youngblood. Youngblood’s work encompasses patterns and flow of our natural world. They are executed with figures, symbols, and patterned paths in mediums of gouache, charcoals, and acrylic on paper, panel, or canvas. She also creates refined etchings and prints from her own in-studio press.

Youngblood reveals in her artist statement that her practice explores the passing of time and the tension between the human longing for reassuring repetition and – at the same time — change. She is particularly interested in our human ability to see only what we expect to see, to
misinterpret, to assume our partial picture is the whole, or to completely overlook the significant. Her art is multi- layered, complex. She develops each piece slowly, building up layers of meaning and changing visual emphasis to create a piece that is dense with meaning and yet open to interpretation by the viewers. Her current art is loosely built on the lines and patterns from daily weather maps and images of weather – rain, snow, clouds, hail. She explores the constancy, variation, and violence hidden within the familiar, reassuring seasonal cycles. In recognition of her achievements, the Forum Gallery at Brookhaven College (Dallas) organized and hosted a retrospective, Judy Youngblood: The Effects of Time and Weather. Peter Briggs, Director of the Artist Printmaker Research Collection at the Museum at Texas Tech University said, “Spanning her career, the fifty artworks in this exhibition brought together a remarkable range of prints, drawings, and paintings on paper.”

In 2019 she had a solo show, Unsettled Conditions, at William Campbell Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, and was honored as Printmaker Emeritus by Southern Graphics Council International, the largest organization of artist printmakers in the world.

Recently Youngblood has had solo exhibitions and installations in the Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, Texas, Flatbed Press and Gallery, Austin, Texas, and the Ellen Noël Art Museum of the Permian Basin, Odessa. Additionally, her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, The Portland Museum of Art, Portland and many private collections. Her work has been included in more than three hundred invitational or juried group exhibitions around the world. Judy Youngblood is a Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas where she taught printmaking and book arts for more than 20 years. Youngblood was a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, a Fulbright Scholar at Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris, and earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Please visit Judy Youngblood’s page on the WCG website and ARTSY for more works.