Essays
Heidi Rabben, The Sky Below, Exhibition Catalog, Marin MOCA, 2025
...The Sky Below reframes science and speculative fiction as intervention rather than escape. Like the feminist writers who preceded them, these artists don't just imagine other worlds - they show us how can remake the one we share.
Janna Keegan, Julia Goodman: Material Transformations, Reunited Exhibition Catalog, San Francisco Advocacy for National Museum of Women in the Arts and California College of the Arts, 2025
Working primarily with hand-formed paper created from repurposed textiles, Julia Goodman collapses past and present, embedding personal and collective memory into her medium. Her work interrogates themes of labor, gender, materiality, with a particular focus on the invisibility of women's contributions. Transcending representation, her art functions as a form of embodied storytelling, where materials transformation parallels the persistence of memory. Through a careful engagement with scale, texture, and color, she not only recovers lost narratives but also insists on their continued presence, positioning paper as back an archive and an active site of meaning...
Tanya Zimbardo, Mother of Collaboration, Exhibition Catalog, The Good Ship Dodo, 2025
Repurposed materials figure into the collaborative approach of Julia Goodman and Irving Goodman Hall in combining papermaking, sculpture, and painting. Julia works expansively with handmade paper and Irving has learned to prepare pulp with her...Their brightly colored "Love Galaxy" (2025) is a dynamic blend of various fabrics drawn from home including Irving's threadbare pants.
Jenni Sorkin, Speculative Retrievals, Exhibition Catalog, The Salina Art Center, 2019
For over a decade, Bay Area artist Julia Goodman has explored the hand papermaking process and its potential for effecting transformation and healing. Conceptually, Goodman's practice is reimagining of the ancient Judaic bereavement custom "k'riah", the mourning ritual of making a tear in one's outer garment before the burial of a family member. Symbolically, the opening created by the tear provides a portal through which the mourner's heart can pass. At the conclusion of the mourning period, the tear is mended, resulting in healing and scarring, real and symbolic. In 2007 Goodman turned to her ancestral past as a way of moving from the present inot the future following the loss of her father to cancer, just two weeks before beginning her MFA program at California College of the Arts. It is from this experience that Goodman's current practic has grown...
Jenni Sorkin, Live Knowledge Production, Social Paper: Hand Papermaking in the Context of Socially Engaged Art, Exhibition Catalog, Center for Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College Chicago, 2014
...Julia Goodman, for example, working with a forgotten historical record, examined the labor of Italian immigrant rag pickers and trash collectors, the lowest social strata in the early twentieth-century San Francisco. Utilizing refuse on the very site of their labors, at Recology, she made small headstone-like homages, spelling out the women's names in fancy scripts made of pure white cotton-like paper installed on a while wall, ghosting it with their presence.
Gilsdorf, Bean,Julia Goodman: Overlap, The Present Group, April 2012
Latimer, Tirza True, Paper Trail: Following Julia Goodman, Open Space SFMOMA, February 2012
Roberts, Adrienne Skye, Action, Ritual, and Ephemerality: Julia Goodman and the (de)Appropriation Wall, Open Space SFMOMA, 2009