[May, 2012] Welcome to the newly-spiffed website of Julie Püttgen.

Under the Shadowless Tree - a show of my Rider Diptychs, encaustic paintings, postcards, and other recent works on paper - just finished at AVA Gallery in Lebanon, NH. Hoorah! It was fitting to share my work locally (since a lot of it was made here in NH), and the response was generous & positive. In other exciting regional arts news, I've just been juried into the League of NH Craftsmen for my handmade books and encaustic paintings. I've always been a hybrid creature & it's exciting to add a really amazing craft community to the art-circles of my work in the world.

I'll be teaching drawing, animation, encaustic painting, and public art mural classes for adults and teens at AVA this Summer & offering private lessons on an ongoing basis. You can check the AVA website for class details, or contact me. I'll also be working in the kitchen at Cedar Circle Farm in Thetford, VT this season. Hoorah for pickles, pesto, and the harvest rolling in.

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.

Ratsalad DeLuxe, online quasi-quarterly arts journal extraordinaire, is now offline. Rest in peace, super-rat.