Julie Lapping Rivera began her career in New York, working as a teaching artist with the Studio In a School Association, Museum of Modern Art, and Lincoln Center Institute. She is a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship recipient in Drawing, and has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Julie earned her MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute and her BFA in Printmaking from the University of Massachusetts. Her artist residencies include Soaring Gardens in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, La Muse, in La Bastide, France, and Scoula Internazionale di Grafica, Venice, Italy.
The meditative process of carving a woodblock to bring forth an image is a source of endless fascination for Julie. Working primarily in woodcut often combined with collage, Julie works with images in the way a poet constructs a poem, with an implied, open-ended narrative thread. While the work is frequently rooted in autobiographical or current events, what interests her most is the collective interior world of thoughts, feelings, and dreams. She seeks to create an emotional world that invites contemplation and connection.
More recently, her gaze has turned outward towards social issues. For the past four years she has been creating an ongoing series of woodcut portraits of women in history, many of whom have been overlooked. The prints are accompanied by portrait poems written by an ever growing community of women poets. Collaborating with fellow artists and writers is an important part of her practice.