My artwork explores my passion for native plants of the tallgrass prairie and acts of cultivation, in the context of ecological crisis. My mixed media studio paintings comprise playful, emergent, and responsive layers of printed and painted botanical forms, combining multiple material processes, to suggest the many simultaneous systems and relationships active in the natural world. It is my hope that my paintings, with their shifting language and saturated color, can create dynamic worlds where wildflowers come in and out of focus. In these works, vitality and entanglement are prioritized over traditional compositional resolution, in an attempt to bewilder the viewer and decenter the human perspective of the natural world.

I often spend my nights awake, anxiously thinking over the current and coming ecological challenges, reading and listening for new paths forward.  My days follow a joyful curiosity about these wonderful indigenous flowers. My artwork dwells in this paradoxical intensity as both a requiem for the lost prairie and an incantation for hope.

I also create public-facing artwork in the Flowers for Marlborough Project.  This project confronts and attempts to impact urban blight in the Marlborough neighborhood of Kansas City, MO by interjecting large-scale paintings of native plants on neglected and abandoned properties.  In addition, I have conducted free workshops and host native plant seedling give aways to the community.

Julie Farstad was born and raised in Elmira, New York. She earned her BFA in Painting at the University of Notre Dame and her MFA in Painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Farstad is a Professor of Painting and Social Practice at the Kansas City Art Institute. She lives and works in the Marlborough neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri with her husband and two sons.