Julia Couzens | B E S P O K E O L O G Y
Press Release
Julia Couzens | B E S P O K E O L O G Y
Exhibition Dates: April 11 – May 16, 2026
In Conversation: Saturday, April 11th at 2pm.
Julia Couzens & Sarah Amos
Reception follows from 3-5:30pm
Bespoke – tailor made to fit the unfit, the cast offs and awkward square pegs splitting the seams of meaning. These textile hybrids emerge from experience, from feeling my way across life’s material spectrum.
Julia Couzens
Working intuitively rather than executing preconceived ideas, Couzens’s singular approach to her studio practice begins in picking through practical things around her, the mundane heap of life. Taking these things as they are, alert to what comes alive in her hand and triggers her senses, Couzens fashions abstract works both improvisational and acutely considered.
Fabric remnants, paper, wood scrap, thread, bits of hardware and discarded notions from consumer culture accumulate energy and presence as she stitches, bundles, cuts, recuts, patches, layers and folds – sorting possibilities while watching for a move. Tulle is foundational to Couzens’s constructions. She uses it like paint, its transparency and nuanced palette trigger the senses, sending shivers that deliberately undermine Date Night notions of femininity. It’s a fragile medium, but heaviness and density can be felt; identities dissolve into pure form, color fields float and flow, calling
our sensibilities to dance.
For Couzens, questions have a longer life than answers and she intentionally leaves work on pause, the eye, mind, and senses continuously circulating. When she sticks the landing, in irritated fits of resistance to her considerable stockpile of formal conclusions, she pivots, renegotiating the heightened space of charged ambiguity. In these fraught days of divisiveness, such beckoning states offer psychic space on reverie’s higher ground.
Julia Couzens (b 1947) earned a MA from the California State University, Sacramento, in 1987 and her MFA from the University of California, Davis, in 1990. Her drawings and hybrid objects have been shown nationally and internationally at over twenty solo and two-person exhibitions, and fifty group exhibitions. Couzens received the The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, New York and the Art Matters Foundation Award, New York. Collections include Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; The Frederick Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, CA; Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA and the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, CA. Exhibitions include the Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; San Francisco Fine Arts Museums Legion of Honor, CA and Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, Las Vegas, NV; Cheongju Contemporary Craft Biennale, South Korea among others. Residencies include the The Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation (RAiR), New Mexico. Julia Couzens is also featured in the recent book TEXTILES x ART, published by Thames and Hudson, 2025.
Artist Page
Sarah Amos | Tipping Point
Press Release
Sarah Amos | Tipping–Point
Exhibition Dates: April 11 – May 16, 2026
In Conversation: Saturday, April 11th at 2pm.
Sarah Amos & Julia Couzens
Reception follows from 3-5:30pm
Currently, there are a number of artists who are combining different processes and materials to push a traditional form or medium – painting and printmaking, for example – into a fresh place. One area where that push is proving productive is printmaking. Among the artists whose work should be singled out, I would include Sarah Amos, Didier William, and Tammy Nguyen.
–John Yau, Poet/Art Critic, Hyperallergic, Nov. 2019
Sarah Amos is a master printmaker who defies the traditions of printmaking; instead, she explores the opulent hand and texture of textiles. Drawing on the influence of Japanese prints, architecture, and the graphic symbolism and movement of manga, Amos has developed a body of work that pushes printmaking into a richer, more expansive terrain. Her process begins with sketches in a sketchbook, which she develops into 16 × 20 inch gouache drawings on paper, typically made in groups of six, allowing forms, colors, and patterns to evolve in conversation with one another. From the 50 to 60 drawings she produces each year, only a small number are translated into large-scale textiles, each selected for its resonance and ability to hold the weight of that transformation.
The final iteration is a unique mixed media hybrid textile ‘painting’, requiring a one-thousand-pound press. Amos drives acrylic ink deep into the tooth of the material surface, creating a soft, velvety ground that she layers with yarn and stitching. In these hybrid works, thread does not simply sit on top of the printed image; it extends and activates it, intensifying the relationship between color, background, surface, and sculptural form. With more than 30 years of experience in printmaking, she’s developed a multivariant approach that brings together an understanding of fine art printing, stitching, appliqué, and collage in singular compositions that are at once unconventional, tactile, and painterly.
Sarah Amos received the prestigious 2024 Vermont Prize from juror Phong H. Bui, artist, curator, co-founder and publisher of The Brooklyn Rail. Amos also received the 2020 Joan Mitchell Center Artists-in-Residence, rescheduled to 2021; and the 2020 Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Recent and past exhibitions include the CUE Art Foundation, New York in 2019; the Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia; Fisher Museum of Art, University of Southern California; Penn State University, Pennsylvania; and Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
Originally from Australia, Sarah Amos lives and works on the East Coast. She left Australia to attend the Tamarind Institute of Lithography in New Mexico where she became a certified Tamarind Master Printer in Lithography. In 1998 Sarah became the Master Printer for the Vermont Studio Center Press, a position she would hold for 10 years. Amos was an Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth, Williams and Bennington Colleges teaching Printmaking and Drawing. Press includes Hyperallergic, Artforum, Art & Object, Art New England and Widewalls. Museum collections include The Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, NH; La Trobe Art Institute Museum, Melbourne, Australia; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; The Fleming Museum of Art, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT.