A selection of plates from Julie Green’s series “The Last Supper” installed in the museum’s Phoebe and Ed Forio Gallery.
Green was born in Yokosuka, Japan, in 1961. They grew up with their mother in Des Moines, Iowa, following their parents’ separation, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Kansas, in Lawrence. In their artist statement, they reflected on early influences: “Growing up in Iowa, I admired family quilts and ukiyo-e prints at home and the neighbor’s yard with larger-than- life historical figures and 20’ American flag made with ears of colored corn. An appreciation for the homemade and handmade led me to paint blue food.” A 1999 Oklahoma newspaper clipping that described a man’s final moments before execution inspired Green to begin “The Last Supper” series. Despite the crimes that the man had committed, the comforting quality of his food selections reminded Green of dinners with their family and humanized him in their eyes. The centrality of food in “The Last Supper” humanizes death row inmates to the public and encourages viewers to consider their relationship to the U.S. prison system. “Food carries powerful associations with care, ritual, culture and comfort. In ‘The Last Supper,’ these meanings sit in tension with the realities of incarceration and execution. The meals depicted are often ordinary — even banal — which heightens the unsettling contrast between everyday human needs and the finality of state-sanctioned capital punishment,” shared Odo. “By centering food as the primary visual subject, the work encourages viewers to reflect on how the prison system manages bodies and lives, even in moments framed as gestures of compassion or dignity.”
The museum’s learning and engagement department organized a series of ceramics workshops for different audiences, including multiple UGA classes, to engage with Green’s work. After viewing “The Last Supper,” workshop participants created their own ceramic work of art in response. The museum also held a Teen Studio program focused on the idea of “art as activism,” as well as two offsite workshops at carceral institutions in Athens and North Georgia. “Together, through looking, conversation and art- making, we explore how Green’s work evokes powerful associations with care, ritual, culture and comfort, and consider these themes in juxtaposition to the realities of incarceration and execution,” said Callan Steinmann, director of learning and engagement, who co-facilitated the workshops with independent teaching artist Kristen Bach. “The Last Supper” makes abstract ideas about the ethics of capital punishment concrete by drawing attention away from the spectacle of crime and toward the universal, life-sustaining act of eating, thereby humanizing death row inmates. Green’s work was installed in the museum’s Phoebe and Ed Forio Gallery, in its permanent collection wing, alongside decorative arts from its collection that relate to rituals of eating. An industrial-style desk in the gallery held a comment book in which visitors could share their reactions. Three plates from Green’s “First Meal” series also appeared. This much smaller series, painted in color, illustrates the first meals after release of exonerated people and the circumstances around those meals.
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