Cyanotype Week: Julia Whitney Barnes

Cyanotype Week: Julia Whitney Barnes by Vicente CayuelaJune 27, 2025

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This week we are celebrating the artistry of five unique artists exploring the frontiers of cyanotype. For our last installment, we introduce the mix-media and site-specific installation project Planting Utopia by Julia Whitney Barnes. An interview with the artist follows.

Julia Whitney Barnes, portrait by © Sean Hemmerle

Julia Whitney Barnes is an artist living in Poughkeepsie, NY who works in a variety of media from cyanotypes, watercolor, oil paintings, ceramic sculptures, glass, murals, and site-specific installations. She has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally including recent solo/two person exhibitions at Galerie Julian Sander, Cologne, Germany, and the Armour-Stiner Octagon House Museum, Irvington, NY, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Kent CT; group exhibitions at the Dorksy Museum, New Paltz, NY; Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT; Woodstock Artists Association & Museum (WAAM), Woodstock, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, ME; Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY; and Garvey|Simon NY, New York, NY. She was awarded fellowships from New York State Council on the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Arts Mid-Hudson, Abbey Memorial Fund for Mural Painting/National Academy of Fine Arts, and the Gowanus Public Art Initiative, among others.

Born in Newbury, VT, Julia Whitney Barnes spent two decades in Brooklyn, before moving to the Hudson Valley in 2015. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and her MFA from Hunter College. Whitney Barnes has created site-specific installations at the Albany International Airport, Albany, NY; Brookfield Place/Winter Garden, New York, NY; Arts Brookfield, Brooklyn, NY, Vassar College/The Vassar Institute, Poughkeepsie, NY; the Wilderstein Sculpture Biennial, Rhinebeck, NY; Shaker Heritage Society, Albany NY; The Trolley Barn/Fall Kill Creative Works, Poughkeepsie, NY; GlenLily Grounds, Newburgh, NY; ArtsWestchester, White Plains, NY; Gowanus Public Arts Initiative, Brooklyn, NY; Space All Over/Fjellerup Bund i Bund & Grund, Fjellerup, Denmark; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council/Sirovitch Senior Center, New York, NY; Brooklyn School of Inquiry, Brooklyn, NY; New York City Department of Transportation, New York, NY; and Figment Sculpture Garden, Governors Island, NY and among other locations. Whitney Barnes was awarded a glass commission for NYC Public Art for Public Schools/Percent for Art that was completed in 2024 at PS253 in Brooklyn.

Follow Julia on Instagram & TikTok: @juliawhitneybarnes

Planting Utopia

I photographed and collected specimens from over 150 plants in the herb garden at Shaker Heritage Society. The Society is located at the site of the Shakers’ first settlement in the United States, known as Watervliet. Its herb garden pays homage to the significance of the Shakers’ herb cultivation, and seed and medicinal herb industries. I developed a series of works on paper and canvas with plants collected from the Shaker herb garden. Their compositions were based upon nineteenth-century Shaker ‘gift’ drawings that were complex, divinely inspired revelations of spiritual perfection, often symmetrical and incorporating botanical elements.

I often work with the cyanotype process, an early cameraless photographic process that was invented in 1842, the same time period the Shaker gift drawings were being created. For my works on paper and linen, the unique blue and white prints are just the beginning and then I draw and paint in many layers utilizing watercolor, gouache and ink onto thick sheets of cotton paper or fabric. The Prussian blue created through the cyanotype process is significant to Shaker culture in that it was considered celestial and meeting houses often featured blue to be connected with heaven.

Through the use of the cyanotype medium, I manipulate pressed plants along with intricately cut photographic negatives. Given that sunlight starts the exposure process with cyanotype chemistry, I carefully arrange elaborate compositions at night and utilize long exposures under natural or UV light to create the final prints. Each selected flower or plant is preserved through a pressing process in which I dissect and shape each form—akin to a specimen from a natural history museum—and then lay everything out in massive flat files in my studio. For plants that are too bulbous to press, I photograph them from many angles and create transparency negatives that are printed along with the physical objects placed on the paper. There is a directness to the link between botany and the cyanotype photogram technique because of the physical plant/object leaving its mark. I am interested in creating objects that feel both beautiful and mysterious. Each of my works recall something familiar yet slightly outside of time.

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Why cyanotype?

JWB: Nature has always been my muse. I collect inspiration from my forays into the natural world with the intent of bringing those experiences and feelings directly back to my studio. I love the directness of cyanotype and also the sense of transformation that always makes me think about alchemy.

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When was the first time you encountered the medium?
JWB: The very first time I made a cyanotype was on the precoated “sun print” paper at summer camp when I was a kid. I saw cyanotypes by Susan Weil and Robert Rauschenberg about 25 years ago but didn’t really think about making any myself at that time. The first time I consciously made a cyanotype was about 14 years ago of my paper cutouts that I would use in collage and as resists for glazing ceramic sculptures. I also printed individual plants to preserve their shapes for painting reference images.

What about this photographic process interests you the most?

JWB: I have a deep love of blue and white so that was my initial interest that deepened through countless experiments with various surfaces and ways that I could “fail” and then learn from and move on from that “failure.”

How do the particularities of the medium relate to your overall artistic philosophies?

JWB: I love the medium’s natural infinity to plants, sun, water and process. The seasonality of it is also appealing and ties into my interest in creation of herbaria as a way for “plants to live forever.”

Have you developed your own process working in this medium? If so, can you guide us through it?

JWB: My background is in painting, printmaking, ceramics, public art, murals etc. so I bring this experience to the creation of cyanotypes. I used to hand paint/tint series of intaglio prints including works that I would print with blue ink and a lot of my cyanotype process is related. I also think my experience in ceramics working with so many layers of glaze and creating resists and watching the kiln transformations has a carry over into what I do with cyanotype. I like to push the scale and enjoy making expansive work as well as intimate works on paper.

Have you encountered limitations with the medium, and if so, what were they and how have you tried to overcome them?

JWB: One limitation is the color palette of blue and white but there are many ways to expand upon the blue. I have done quite a bit of toning with natural dyes as well as working into my prints with a large variety of mediums on all sorts of paper and fabric.

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How do you think the public perception of cyanotype has changed in the art world?

JWB: Cyanotype is hugely popular right now. I would guess that more people are making cyanotypes than ever before in history. Online resources certainly help with the spread of knowledge as well as seeing what people create worldwide. Generally categorized as “cameraless photography” that isn’t quite accurate, and I see it more as printmaking that also can benefit from cameras.