Julio Grinblatt

October 2 – November 1, 2003

My artistic practice sits on three axes: the object, the communal and the educational.
My overall project Usos de la fotografía has unfolded, since the mid-nineteen nineties, into more than a dozen parallel series that vary widely. In each one, I deploy specific procedures that determine the conditions in which photography is produced, where photography is understood both as image and as event. The word “uses” empirically articulates photography’s ability to produce thinking and knowledge and to posit the mixed nature of the medium. That is, how it acts and ensues both inside the image and beyond it.

My practice systematically explores the modes of perception enabled by photography. It engages the technical, artistic, and social dimensions of the medium and places emphasis on the apparatus as bearer of a system of representation.

At the same time, these concepts are corrupted and crossed by autobiographical and aesthetic concerns. Taxonomic and conceptual operations long used in artistic practices appear connected yet problematized through the interjection of personal issues: identity, belonging, moments of transition.
In regards to the communal, I collaborate with artist Bibi Calderaro since 2012, curating a biennial mushroom and edible plants foraging event in NYC’s urban commons. The foraging is followed by a wild-cooking workshop, communal meal and readings, all made available to the public via word of mouth.
Finally, teaching closes these intentions to communicate the idea of photography as a field of knowledge. I teach at the Hunter College Art Department, in New York, since 2009.

Julio Grinblatt has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally for the past three decades.

In 2001, Grinblatt mounted the solo exhibition Uses of Photography at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA). He has participated in group exhibitions at museums, such as MoMA PS1, El Museo del Barrio (New York); ICA (Philadelphia); Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid); Museum of Fine Arts (Brussels); Amos Anderson Art Museum (Helsinki); Centro de la Imagen (Mexico City).
Grinblatt’s work is represented in collections worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, (Houston); Museum für Fotografie (Berlin); Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum (New York); Mead Art Museum (Amhearst); Light Work (Syracuse); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires), and Museum of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro).
His work is part of several anthologies of contemporary photography including Blink, from Phaidon Press, London, 100 Latin American Artists, from Exit, Madrid and Historia General del Arte en la Argentina, Tomo XIII. In 2005 Blue Sky Gallery (Portland) published a book on his series People facing their birthday cakes. Arta Editions (Buenos Aires) published Uses of Photography VII: Photos, a book on his homonymous performance in Buenos Aires in 2016.

In 2012, Grinblatt co-curated the survey exhibition Notations: The John Cage Effect Today at Hunter College Times Square Gallery together with Joachim Pissarro, Bibi Calderaro, and Michelle Yun. The exhibition was discussed in-depth by writer Thomas Crow in Artforum’s Best of 2012 issue.
Grinblatt holds an MFA from Hunter College at CUNY, where he currently teaches.