Transformations - From Fabric to Paper

Join us at the Koret Auditorium or watch the presentation live via Zoom Webinar.

In Person: Free and open to all—no ticket required.

Non-TAC Members: Register through Eventbrite to receive the Zoom link. A recording will be available for 14 days following the event.

TAC Members: A webinar link will be sent from Zoom the week of the event.

This lecture will introduce the history of rag papermaking - making paper from discarded textiles - and focus on Goodman’s innovative and interdisciplinary work anchored in this history.

Julia Goodman's practice begins with repurposed bedsheets and t-shirts — fabrics carrying traces of daily life. Building on rag paper history and the women's labor that prepared used cloth for paper mills, she gathers, sorts, tears, and pulps textiles. Julia transforms materials closest to bodies into hand-formed paper. Her innovations in shape, thickness, edges, shadows, and sustainable color foreground overlooked supports that carry us through vulnerable experiences.

The catalyst was personal: losing her father in 2007 drew Julia toward texture and material transformation; having a child in 2019 reawakened her relationship to color and fabric. Most color comes directly from original fabrics, pulped and mixed without dyes. Julia builds wet-into-wet to form low-relief surfaces with expanding ellipses. Watercolor washes accentuate texture. Torn fabric and impressions left by removed material interrupt forms with evidence of both rupture and repair, presence and absence.

Grief and caretaking drew Julia toward the night sky, toward questions of deep time, cycles, and scale. That pull brought her into conversation with astronomers who are also mothers, contemporary and historical. Their unacknowledged labor mirrors the women who prepared rag for paper mills: essential, generative, rarely centered. Her recent work combines hand-formed paper with recorded conversations with Dr. Isabel Hawkins and Dr. Aparna Venkatesan, whose perspectives illuminate parallels between personal and cosmic time — orbits, cycles, gravity — and honor the layers of care that make human life, art, and discovery possible.

Bio:

Julia Goodman works at the intersection of papermaking, textiles, sculpture, and painting. Her work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, DePaul Art Museum, Recology San Francisco, and Google. Unimaginable Units of Time marked her first solo museum exhibition at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in 2025. Group exhibitions include National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), Berkeley Art Center, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, DePaul Art Museum, and Poetry Foundation. Her residencies include JB Blunk Residency, Recology SF, Creativity Explored, Salina Art Center, The Space Program, and The Eames Institute. Goodman was selected for the 2020 Women to Watch Award by the San Francisco Advocacy for the NMWA.

Goodman taught “Papermaking: Fiber to Paper” - the last remaining semester-long papermaking college class in the Bay Area from 2024 - 2026. Goodman was a Visiting Lecturer at Columbia College Chicago with an emphasis on papermaking from 2014 - 2015. Additionally, she has led workshops throughout the Bay Area, including NIAD, Creative Growth, San Jose Children’s Museum, Exploratorium, and Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

She earned an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BA in International Relations and Peace & Justice Studies from Tufts University. In between, she studied art at Santa Monica College, where she started making paper in 2003 with a kitchen blender and old window screens. She lives in the Bay Area with artist Michael Hall and their family.

Goodman is currently an Artist in Residence at the Eames Institute and part of the 2026 Teaching Artist Cohort through the Center for Craft. She is leading monthly Wrenching News Workshops as part of Maren Hassinger: Living, Moving, Growing at BAMPFA. This summer Goodman’s work is included in Contemporary Women in Abstraction at Paul Thiebaud Gallery and Recology Retrospective at Heron Arts.

www.jagoodman.com
@juliaannegoodman

Waning (August 19, 2007 - July 14, 2008) & Waxing (July 27, 2018 - May 10, 2019)

2019 - 2020

Hand-formed paper made from different color bedsheets and t-shirts.

33 x 98 x 1 inches

Photo credit: Phil Maisel

Weaver (iii)

2025

Straight on and side view

Watercolor on hand-formed paper made from different color bedsheets and t-shirts with torn fabric inclusions.

45 x 32 x 1.5 inches

Photo credit: Francis Baker