JULIA SCHWADRON MARIANELLI
Julia Schwadron Marianelli’s paintings examine how we inhabit and interpret the natural world, using material, text, and abstraction to reveal the connections between ecology, perception, and lived experience.
Weed Impunity, acrylic ink on canvas, bundle dyed with plants, 38” x 42” 2021. Julia Schwadron Marianelli
Julia Schwadron Marianelli’s paintings explore the fragile exchange between human perception and the natural world. Working from close observation of her surroundings in the Sierra Nevada, she transforms fragments of landscape, local flora, text, and found materials into layered paintings that exist between image, memory, and experience. Her works are not depictions of nature, but investigations into how we encounter, interpret, and shape the environments around us. Through accumulated marks, embedded materials, and shifting surfaces, Schwadron Marianelli creates spaces where the visible and invisible coexist: a place where landscape becomes language and painting becomes a record of attention.
Across bodies of work including High Country and Trembling Grass / Vibrating Grass, Schwadron Marianelli uses painting as a way of mapping both external landscapes and internal states. Text fragments, botanical impressions, and abstracted organic forms become starting points for meditations on ecology, vulnerability, resilience, and the systems that shape our lives. Her process embraces collaboration with materials themselves, including plant-dyed fabrics and surfaces that carry traces of their own origins. The resulting paintings hold the quiet intensity of observation, inviting viewers into a deeper awareness of place, time, and our connection to the living world.
Left: Natural Glitch, acrylic ink on paper on board, 20 × 16 in, 2025. Right: Digital Wild, acrylic ink on paper on board, 20 × 16 in, 2025.
JULIA SCHWADRON MARIANELLI
Bio
Julia Schwadron Marianelli is painter who has shown her work across the country as well as internationally. Schwadron Marianelli served as founder of, and the Assistant Director for, the Low Residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Sierra Nevada University, helping to provide alternative modes for non-traditional students to create sustainable lives in the arts. Schwadron Marianelli was a Jacob Javits Fellow from 2002-2003 and has been a Joan Mitchell Fellow in 2006. She has been a resident of the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Interlude Artist Residency. In addition to her studio practice, she serves as an artist mentor, workshop instructor and facilitator. From 2010 – 2011, she was a Visiting Professor of Painting and Artist in Residence at Chiang Mai University, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Iowa from 2007-2009. Schwadron Marianelli received her BA in Studio art from UC San Diego in 1998 and her MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art in 2003. She currently lives and works in South Lake Tahoe, CA with her husband and two kids, where she continues to paint and advocate for alternatives to traditional art education.
Studio visit with Julia Schwadron Marianelli
Suppression Tactics, 24” x 18” acrylic ink on paper on board, 2021. Julia Schwadron Marianelli
"Downward Weep," acrylic ink on paper, 6 x 6”, 2024
"A Dense Head" acrylic ink on paper, 6 x 6”, 2024
"Deep Seed" acrylic ink on paper, 6 x 6”, 2024
"Edge of Vein" acrylic ink on paper, 6 x 6”, 2024
"Heart Shaped Leaves" acrylic ink on paper, 6 x 6”, 2024
"Holding Leaves" acrylic ink on paper, 6 x 6”, 2024
"Lost Touch" acrylic ink on paper, 6 x 6”, 2024
"Shady Understory" acrylic ink on paper, 6 x 6”, 2024
"Small Teeth" acrylic ink on paper, 6 x 6”, 2024
Installation view of High Country series at the solo exhibition The Secrets of Self Mastery
High Country series
In her recent work, Julia has been using still life objects from her immediate natural environment as starting points for paintings and drawings. Seven years ago, she relocated from New York City, to South Lake Tahoe, CA - landscapes she considers polar opposites. Loosely titled, “High Country,” this work is evolving out of her exploration of this new topography, and the experience of living in the mountains as a contemporary artist and thinker.
Painting is a literal way to map Julia’s understanding of her surroundings and create a record of her relationship to them. The paintings she is making now initiate from a glimpse of a color or texture she observes outside (or drags inside). She then uses a mixture of oil and water-based paints as well as bleach and charcoal to layer these observed moments over text-based abstractions, embedding imagery or pattern onto and into paper and other manipulated fabric surfaces.
available work below
contact Melhop Gallery º7077 for prices and further information
hello@melhopgallery.com
High Country Arrangement, 48 x 48 in., oil and acrylic on dyed canvas, 2018
Night Tangle 48 x 48 in., oil + acrylic on denim, 2018
High Country #1 oil on denim 24 x 24 inches, 2017 (PRIVATE COLLECTION)
High Country 2, oil on printed fabric 24 x 24 inches, 2017
High Country #4 oil on denim 24 x 24 inches, 2017 (PRIVATE COLLECTION)
Phlox 20 x 16 in., acrylic ink on linen over board, 2019 (PRIVATE COLLECTION)
What's left over
Where we end up is where we started, Traces, 2006
The largescale paintings in the " What' s left over..." series are oil on linen, white paint on a black ground, and evoke the photographic negative, a photogram, or an x-ray. Unlike any of these comparisons, the paintings are made by hand, in direct response to an object itself, in this case, a bouquet of dead flowers.
Each painting in the series measures 54 ” x 90 ”, enforcing a relation to a human scale. The white paint on the black surface is transparent in parts, and the brushstrokes are present as evidence of potential life left inside what is already dead
available work below
contact Melhop Gallery º7077 for prices and further information
hello@melhopgallery.com
Installation view of What’s Left Over
Having moved to Lake Tahoe from New York City 8 years ago, artist Julia Schwadron found a personal connection to her new surroundings through trail running. Her most recent body of paintings, "High Country", reflects elements of the landscape, the light and ephemera she collects in her mind as she moves through the local trails of South Lake Tahoe, California. This video is a small reflection on what it’s meant to her paintings and her life to have found a way to connect her physical body to her natural surroundings, in order to find new imagery and meaning in her work.
Camera/Edit: Bligh Gillies
Second Camera: Cheyne Lempe
Music: Louis Schwadron
Audio Mix: Andy Mead
Julia Schwadron Marianelli in her studio at Interlude Residency in Hudson, NY 2021
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2025 FUTURE GARDEN, PRAx Center for the Creative Arts, Oregon State University, Corvalis, OR
2021 TREMBLING GRASS / VIBRATING GRASS: RECENT PAINTINGS, Oates Park Arts Center, Fallon NV
2021 THE SECRETS OF SELF MASTERY, Melhop Gallery º7077, Lake Tahoe, Nevada
2018 HIGH COUNTRY, Spinster Sisters, Santa Rosa, CA
2012 EVERYTHING, H Gallery Project Space, Bangkok, Thailand
2012 JULIA SCHWADRON, Paintings + Drawings, Farnham Galleries, Simpson College, Indianola, IA
2011 YOU ARE HERE, Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery, Chiang Mai University, Thailand
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2026 Out of Line Artsy Art Fair showcasing Women Led Galleries and the Women Artists they Champion
Staff & Faculty Exhibition, Lake Tahoe Community College, South Lake Tahoe, CA
2025 DINNER PARTY, The Middleroom Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2024 AFFORDABLE ART FAIR, with Melhop Gallery, NY, NY
THE SENSIBLE WORLD, curated by Julia Schwadron Marianelli + Molly Allen, Tahoe Gallery, University of Nevada Reno, Lake Tahoe, Incline Village, NV
WET INCANTATION, curated by Austin Pratt, Sheppard Contemporary Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, NV
2023 FIELD NOTES, 3-person exhibition, Truckee Donner Recreational Center, Atrium Gallery, Truckee, CA
2022 EYE WANT CANDY, Melhop º7077 Gallery, Zephyr Cove, NV
NO SUCH PLACE, Melhop º7077 Gallery, Zephyr Cove, NV
HOLDING PATTERN, curated by Nick Larsen, Holland Projects Galleries, Reno, NV
HOLLAND BILLBOARD PROJECT, March 2022, Wells + 2nd Street, Reno, NV
FACULTY / STAFF EXHIBITION, Haldan Gallery, Lake Tahoe Community College, South Lake Tahoe, CA
2021 A ROOM OF THEIR OWN, Women Artists of the Sierra, Confidence Firehouse Gallery, Placerville, CA
2018 APPEARING UNANNOUNCED, curated by Sathit Sattarasart, Rikrit Tiravanija’s Studio, Chiang Mai, Thailand FORMERLY PHILLY, University City Arts League, Philadelphia, PA
2017 ARTISTS AT THE RENAISSANCE, curated by Eric Brooks/Sierra Arts, The Renaissance Hotel, Reno, NV
2015 THE PLAIN SENSE OF THINGS, curated by Sarah Lillegard + Jared Stanley, Sierra Nevada University Galleries, Incline Village, NV
2014 POSSESSION II, curated by Brian Curtin + Steve Dutton, Lanchester Gallery, Coventry University, England
2013 POSSESSION, curated by Brian Curtin + Steve Dutton, Bangkok Art + Cultural Center, Thailand
YOUR FACE IS A LANDSCAPE, curated by Sara Reisman + Reina Shibata, Field Projects Gallery, New York, NY
BROOKLYN VISITS HEATH, curated by Heath Ceramics + Pam Morris, Heath Ceramics Showroom, San Francisco, CA
2012 TEMPORARY STORAGE, curated by Chitti Kasemkitvatana, Bangkok Art + Culture Center, Thailand
DISTANCE + MAGNET + CLOSENESS, CMU Art Museum, Chiang Mai University, Thailand
2011 HEADCASE, curated by Laurel Farrin, Lesley Heller Workspace, NY, NY
2010 PULSE Art Fair, Charles James Gallery, Miami, FL
PAPER TALK, Fine Arts Faculty Exhibition, Chiang Mai University Museum, Chiang Mai, Thailand
COPY JAM: TEXT EDITION, A Printinteresting Curatorial Project, The Printer’s Ball, Chicago, IL
REMNANTS, curated by Lisa Lebofsky and Melanie Doll, Fuse Gallery, NY, NY
PALLING AROUND WITH SOCIALISTS, UTurn Artspace, Cincinnati, OH
ONE VERTICAL UNWAVERING BAND OF LIGHT, curated by Mariah Dekkenga, Coe College Sinclair Art Galleries, Cedar Rapids, IA