Born in Newbury, VT, Julia Whitney Barnes spent two decades in Brooklyn before relocating to the Hudson Valley in 2015. She holds a BFA from Parsons School of Design and an MFA from Hunter College. Working across cyanotypes, watercolor, oil, ceramics, glass, murals, installations, and prints, Whitney Barnes has exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally, including the Albany International Airport, Griffin Museum of Photography, Hancock Shaker Museum, WAAM, Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, ME), Carrie Haddad Gallery, and Galerie Julian Sander in Cologne, Germany. Her work is represented in numerous private and public collections, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, LMCC, Arts Mid-Hudson, and others. In 2024, she completed two major commissions: an immersive double-sided glass artwork for NYC’s Percent for Art program and a room-wide mural for the new Vassar College Institute in Poughkeepsie, NY.
Central to her process is the use of cyanotype, a camera-less photographic printing technique first developed in the 19th century. Whitney Barnes presses and arranges plants from her Hudson Valley garden into elaborate nighttime compositions, exposing them to sunlight or UV light to create vivid cyan-blue impressions. She then layers watercolor, gouache, and ink onto the prints, fusing botanical forms with painterly detail in ways that blur the line between scientific record and poetic interpretation.
