Coming out of the Chicago Imagist tradition, Julia Schmitt Healy explores images and iconography from the news, religion, mass media, and personal travel. Her multimedia work — painting, drawing, textiles, collage — describes snippets of her dreams and concerns, hopefully with a bit of humor mixed in, touching on ecological disasters, human relationships, symbolic surrealism, feminism, consumerism, and the natural world.
In 1973 Julia Schmitt Healy (then Julia Schmitt) landed in Nova Scotia after two years in Ethiopia (and a brief stint in Ireland), as she followed the love of her life (so she thought) after developing her Imagist-inspired style of work when living, creating and schooling in Chicago in the late 1960’s. Her tufted portraits of friends, family, lovers and automobiles had garnered a following in Chicago; at Ray Yoshida’s urging she joined the Phyllis Kind Gallery but never had a show there. An example of this work is currently on view at the Art Preserve’s display of Yoshida’s collection in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. As the Imagist scene exploded in Chicago in the early ‘70s, Schmitt’s career all but stalled given her moves abroad yet she never stopped making work, even drawing on flour bags and chamois with ballpoint pen when art supplies were limited in Ethiopia. One could call her a “lost Imagist.”
Julia Schmitt Healy was born in Elmhurst, Illinois and received a BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead. After graduation, Healy moved to Africa, where she traveled and lived, then later toured Europe and moved to Nova Scotia, Canada with her first husband. Her work was represented for many years by Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York and Chicago, as well as Susan Whitney Gallery in Canada. While in school, she co-curated a mail art show with artist Ray Johnson, called “Intercourse” at the Wabash Transit Gallery. Her works have been shown recently at the Lubeznik Center for the Arts in Michigan City, IN and Camayuhs in Atlanta, GA. In 2019, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY acquired two tufted works from 1972. She lives and works in Port Jervis, New York.