We were lucky to catch up with Julie Kornblum recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Julie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?
I have often wondered what it would have been like if I had pursued a regular job. At times I have deeply regretted not “going back to work” after completing my degree, or after my kids were old enough. I went through a period of a few years with that regret when I felt my life as a full-time artist had been self-indulgent. Creating artwork, no matter how impactful, beautiful, and important it might be, didn’t feel like I was making enough of a contribution to the world. I took a tangent away from artwork by working as a grant writer -freelance and part-time- for a homeless service organization. I threw myself into the grant writing and all but abandoned art making.
It was a few years before the organization was ready to hire a full-time grant writer. By then I had come to the conclusion that I did not in fact want to take on a full-time job, at the age of 58 and after more than 20 years of not working a standard job. This was a valuable revelation and put to rest part of that nagging question, “what could’ve, and would’ve happened if I had taken a different path?”
In 2020, deep in the lock down of the pandemic, I started a basket as a gift for my daughter who had recently purchased a house. Enjoying the satisfaction of doing that work again, I realized it had been five years since I had done that kind of artwork.
Now, another three years on, I’m grant writing for a small arts organization who occasionally works with that same homeless organization. I now recognize that all the different things I have done lead me to the place I am now. With my grant writing I’m contributing to the larger San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, Southern California community, and I continue my artistic practice. We can’t ever really know what would have come about if we had taken a different job or path. At some point, I think not knowing becomes OK.
Julie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I am a fiber artist. I knit, crochet, weave, and do basketry. I sew, make garments, I was a pattern maker in the fashion industry in Los Angeles in the 1980’s – 90’s. I went through the fashion design program at Los Angeles Trade Technical College from 1982-1984. I taught power sewing, draping design, and pattern making at Otis College of Art and Design in 1990-97 while I was earning my AA degree at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, then my BA in Art at Cal State Northridge.
I have exhibited my work widely, have been featured in books and magazines, I have taught workshops and have given talks about my work and the issue of plastic pollution that is central to much of my work. I currently have work in exhibitions in two US embassies in Brunei and Estonia.
As I write this, a large “yarnbomb” installation piece, called the Yarn Garden, hangs to my left, in my dining room. I am working on preparing it for a CicLAvia event, CicLAmini—North Hollywood, for September 17. 2023. The Yarn Garden is crocheted and knit from standard, acrylic yarn; it has flowers, a tree made of granny squares, butterflies, bugs, grasses, and a meadow of mushrooms made and contributed by about 40 different creatives. At the event, I will also display a series of large crocheted flowers made from plastic bags with plastic hubcaps as their centers.
I was surrounded by fiber arts and just always wanted to make things with fabric, thread, and yarn. My mother was an avid sewist. One of my aunts did amazing crewel embroidery, caned chairs and all kinds of other crafts. My grandmother taught me to crochet. All she had to do was show me how and I could do it, it’s like I was born with the ability. I learned to knit at a local yarn store in 1987. Because my grandmother both knitted and crocheted, I thought everyone did both, and I wouldn’t be complete until I learned.
I learned to sew in 6th grade, when it was still called Junior High School and all girls took Home Economics, and all boys took shop, and no one ever crossed the streams. I probably would have liked shop, but sewing was also my natural love. I was one of those kids who was always in her bedroom sewing, all the way through high school. Eventually I found my way to Los Angeles, the fashion industry, LA Trade Tech, and the fiber and textile program in the art department at Cal State Northridge.
I was about 30 years old when I went back to school at Pierce College to work towards my BA degree. My daughter was 1 year old at the time, she was 12 and her brother was 10 at my graduation from CSUN in 2002. While I was at CSUN, and the kids were in elementary school, I learned to write grants by being a parent volunteer. I secured over $100,000 to renovate the playgrounds, get new play structures, and put a grass field into the asphalt yard.
In recent years I have written grants to get funding for homeless services, domestic violence services, and arts organizations. I’m currently working with Quilting For Community in Chatsworth, whose mission is building community through teaching the art of quilting free to anyone who wishes to learn. The completed quilts are donated to homeless service providers, hospitals, hospice providers, and pet shelters.
I am very fortunate to be able to choose projects based on doing what I love. And I feel very lucky to still be loving the projects I find myself involved in.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
The subject matter of much of my artwork is environmental concerns, focusing mostly on the issue of plastic pollution. While I was a student in the 1990s I became aware and interested in the vast amount of surplus materials piling up everywhere. In the fiber arts studio at CSUN we had a vast array of surplus materials that were donated to our program. My professor accepted these donations and encouraged students to explore and experiment with so-called non-traditional materials.
Soon after my graduation while I was working on a large project that addressed habitat disappearance and its effect on wildlife, I learned about what was then known as the North Pacific garbage patch. I began focusing my woven wall pieces and sculptural basket pieces on plastic trash. It was disappointing how easy it was to amass a lifetime’s worth of plastic materials to fill my studio. This part of my creative mission has evolved over the years, which I will talk about in a bit.
An unspoken mission driving my creative journey has been to get artworks made of fabric, yarn, and thread – a.k.a. the Fiber Arts – recognized simply as art. I entered a wide variety of juried shows around the US. I would read the criteria for entering, as long as they didn’t say things such as “no craft,” “no fiber and fabric artwork,” and they did invite “all media,” or “mixed media,” I might enter.
In online applications when they ask the medium of the work I would often write in mixed media, environmental, or upcycled. When there was a list with check boxes, and fiber wasn’t listed, these are the media descriptors I would select.
I always spoke of my work as art or artwork, never as craft; and myself as an artist, never, ever as a crafter. I’ve seen an evolution in the past few years things have become more inclusive. When I scroll through listings for juried shows now, many of them will list fiber as one of the media accepted.
Have you ever had to pivot?
When I learned about the plastic trash in the oceans, I was inspired to focus my work on this subject to raise awareness of it. I was not alone, as many artists and organizations worked to publicize the situation.
When I began working mostly with disposable and discarded plastic, I literally picked up trash. I discovered that all the hubcaps one sees lying around are plastic and I began collecting them. I saved packaging from my own home. I put out a call for used plastic shopping bags to use in my woven pieces. For years, every time I went to a meeting of my weaving guild and artist groups, I always came home with a couple of bags filled with plastic bags.
At the same time, even as the plastic bag bans were passed and awareness of the plastic pollution problem became widespread, the amount of refuse in the oceans grew at a faster and faster rate. The discouragement of this reality caused me to question my life’s purpose.
In 2010 a group of people picked up on the growing phenomenon of yarn bombing and I was immediately attracted to it. Working with new, soft yarn was like taking a vacation. It was clean unlike the hubcaps and used plastic bags, it was soft unlike the surplus wire and videotapes, it was not so hard on my hands, and it was pretty.
I joined in on some of the large, collaborative projects with yarn bombing Los Angeles, and I did my own series of small street lamp wrappings along Victory Blvd. in the valley. I Soon learned that these brightly colored, whimsical yarn pieces in unexpected places in public, were not entirely frivolous. Sometimes I would be installing a piece somewhere, and a person would come by and tell me how much they liked it. One day a man stopped and asked me about the purpose of this. I answered it’s just for fun and he said, “well it makes me happy.”
One day a friend shared a Facebook post with a picture of one of my yarn bombs on a granite light pole. The original poster said she was having a rough time lately, been having a bad day, came around the corner and saw this, it made her smile and completely lifted her mood.
Artists communicate impactful experiences and talk about important issues in their artwork. And sometimes they create work that simply gives people joy, delights them, makes them smile, and improves their day. I had always sought the former and more and more lately I also embrace the latter.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.JulieKornblum.com
- Instagram: @JulieKornblumStudio
- Facebook: JulieKornblumStudio
Image Credits
Julie Kornblum Paul Moshay