Artist

Jamian Juliano-Villani attended the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Jersey, graduating with a BFA. While there, she was influenced by the institution's historic ties to Fluxus, her studies with John Yau and Raphael Ortiz, and the Zimmerli Art Museum's collection of 1970s Soviet conceptual painting. Since her first solo exhibition in 2013 –Me, Myself and Jah, at Rawson Projects, New York– Juliano-Villani has been making a body of paintings that explore themes of race, identity, appropriation, and the collapsing of painterly hierarchies, while revealing the artist's burgeoning admiration for the democratic nature of cartoons. In 2021, she opened the East Village gallery and project space O'Flaherty's, with her long-time collaborator Billy Grant, a founding member of the Dearraindrop collective, and Ruby Zarsky, from the pop-disco duo Sateen. In its first year of operation, the gallery exhibited work by Kim Dingle, Ashley Bickerton, Anthea Hamilton, Bobo, and Gelatin. Just as Juliano-Villani's painting practice hinges on the recontextualization of myriad outside sources, so O'Flaherty's shines a light on the work of colleagues and collaborators.