[January, 2012] Welcome to the website of Julie Püttgen.

After the success of A 14th Street Pilgrimage (as part of the 2011 Ritual-themed Art in Odd Places festival in NYC), I undertook A Sewanee Pilgrimage, in collaboration with the extended community of that mighty small town... I only placed a small fraction of the Sewanee tsatsas myself, and the rest of the placements & photography were in the hands of my collaborators & their own idiosyncratic senses of what makes sacred space. It felt wonderful to open up the project in this way, and with so many passionate voices involved, I was delighted to see the results & responses. During my last semester at Sewanee, I also worked on Storysmuggler, a series of creative non-fiction stories coming out of daily life and oral history.

As the new year begins, I have now left my teaching position at Sewanee & settled in Lebanon, NH with my husband. There are so many places and people I love in my old home! And yet I am glad to be settling into our new house & my new studio, and to be participating in various aspects of the Upper Valley NH/VT community. I'll be teaching at AVA in Lebanon, showing in the AVA Gallery in the Spring & finding my way back into the local farm, food, and Buddhist worlds I explored last year. Meanwhile, I plan to continue working on a recent series of encaustic paintings, developing new venues for my work, and singing with the soon-to-be Upper Valley Slavic Women's Choir.

Ratsalad DeLuxe, online quasi-quarterly arts journal extraordinaire, will go offline in April 2012, but for now all past issues are online & available here.