Artist Jamian Juliano-Villani Wants to Keep You Guessing

Jamian Juliano-Villani makes unlikely mash-ups. In her paintings, she juxtaposes weirdly nostalgic images that she has voraciously collected from old books, the Internet, her constantly playing television—wherever she finds them. And at O’Flaherty’s, the buzzy East Village art gallery that she runs with her best friend, Billy Grant, she transports under-recognized artists—often, those who were celebrated in their heyday but are now overlooked—into a new context.

Her debut solo show this past spring, at Gagosian, reportedly sold well, with prices in the five and six figures. O’Flaherty’s, since it opened in 2021, has punched way above its weight. And yet Juliano-Villani, 37, says she has “no fucking clue” how all this happened. Her only plan, she insists, is to have no plan: “I’d like the paintings to stay as open as possible. I used to dictate what the paintings were doing. Now I don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re doing something different, something emotional.”

When asked about the gallery, she looks even more quizzical. “I don’t even know what the fuck O’Flaherty’s is anymore, and that’s the spot I want to be in,” she says. “I trust what we’re doing.”

O’Flaherty was a childhood nickname for Juliano-Villani, based on the joke that despite her Italian heritage, she avoided such staples as garlic and olives. She is a diminutive woman with a large personality, a fondness for profanity, and a husky voice that bears the imprint of her native New Jersey. “I always joke that I want a vocal coach so I don’t have this accent,” she says. “But this is what it is.” The timbre she attributes to cigarettes. “I’ve been smoking so long,” she says with a sigh. She’s trying to quit, and attaches as many as three nicotine patches at a time to her arms while chain-popping Altoids mints.

“She has a painting practice and a social practice,” says Grant, who is her business partner and artistic instigator, as well as her closest pal. “That’s a pretty unique position to be in.” With a third friend, the artist Ruby Zarsky (who is no longer with the gallery), Juliano-Villani and Grant inaugurated O’Flaherty’s during the depths of the Covid pandemic, when people were seeking personal contact. “We’re opportunistic assholes, what can I say?” Juliano-Villani remarks.

They found a storefront on the margins of the East Village, at Avenue C near Fourth Street. “I saw a dance studio,” she recalls. “I knew I wanted it to be in there. There was an old man drinking wine with the longest toenails you’ve ever seen. There were mirrors everywhere. It was so cool.” The mechanics of obtaining a lease and paying the bills didn’t faze her. “We’re just scrappy motherfuckers,” she says. “We figure out a way.”

For their inaugural show, they snared Kim Dingle, a Los Angeles artist who has been exhibiting since the early 1990s and is represented by a mainstream gallery, Sperone Westwater. Dingle is best known for working with dolls that she dresses like babies and places in edgy or combative situations.

Juliano-Villani, a longtime fan of Dingle’s work, says that at O’Flaherty’s, “she showed us what a collaboration is—a mutual understanding, trying to read the room without doing any reading.” But what unfolded, in Grant’s telling, was a little more tempestuous. Large crates of dolls arrived. They were not what he and Juliano-Villani were expecting. “Kim re-dressed them in deadstock baby garbage,” he says. “We were like, this is ridiculous. I went into the Hasidic shops in Brooklyn and found traditional baby gear and dressed them.” This time, it was Dingle who was unhappy. “She locked us out of the show,” he says. In the end, the show went on—barely—with the dolls in different dresses. “She came halfway,” he explains. “Her gallery said we could do it if we had a 24-hour video camera to verify that we weren’t changing the costumes.”

Compared to running the gallery, making art looks easy. Juliano-Villani attended Rutgers University, where she studied printmaking and graphic design. For a while, she produced sculptures using found materials. But once she moved to her own apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, about 15 years ago, she started tracing images on semi-transparent canvases that she draped over a computer monitor. “It’s autobiographical,” she says of her painting. “It can be incredibly simple, so you say, ‘What the fuck is it?,’ or it can be very complex. It’s supposed to look stupid.”

The autobiographical component is murky. In 2013, she was able to afford a projector, which allowed her to make larger paintings. She thinks the first picture she made this way—tracking Juliano-Villani’s career will keep some future art history Ph.D. candidate very busy—was Bounty Hunter, a brightly colored, cartoony canvas of a car hurtling through space past handcuffs, bottles, a motel key, work boots, playing cards, and an eagle.

If you are seeking a password to unlock the code to her art, Juliano-Villani is loath to provide one. “It builds on itself,” she says. “I can’t explain it.” Only under duress does she bend a bit. “She was like a tour guide to her own fucking Gagosian show,” Grant recalls. “I’ve never seen her so stressed out. She was great at it, but if you explain it, you lose the reason you’re doing it. We’re both kind of averse to explaining and demystifying things. Sometimes you come up with an idea, and you don’t want to talk about it because you let all the air out of it. Everyone has talked about it and reacted to it, so you no longer feel like doing it.”

For her Gagosian show, which opened in March, Juliano-Villani engaged a painting studio in China, which she found on the Internet, to execute her ideas. The specifics she refuses to discuss. “It’s a collaborative thing,” she allows. “That’s all I’m going to say.” She makes a zipping motion over her lips. Some of the images were fairly simple: a self-portrait with Elvis, a bowl of SpaghettiOs, the name of Alex Katz under a Gagosian logo. Others were more complicated: in particular, a portrait of Henry Kissinger in a book that is propped up on a stand made of lightning bolts, set against an I Spy book background. “There is a familiarity there for people,” says Kara Vander Weg, a senior director at Gagosian. “But if you don’t recognize the images, there is a humor and playfulness, but also a smartness to the work. There are multiple ways of connecting to it.”

Larry Gagosian discovered Juliano-Villani years before he offered her a show. A group exhibition that his gallery mounted with Jeffrey Deitch in Miami during Art Basel in 2019 included her painting of an elongated pole dancer with distended feet in red platform shoes. She had made it with an airbrush, having watched YouTube videos to learn the spray-paint technique. “I like how cheap it looked,” she says. “And there was no hand involved. The history of oil drove me nuts—it loves itself. A mechanical way to approach painting made it more democratic. And I could get my point across.” To her delight, Gagosian bought the painting, Charlotte’s Web, for his personal collection. “I was really excited,” she says. “It was a huge deal.”

She forged another connection with Gagosian a couple of years later. Since her student days, Juliano-Villani had admired the art of Ashley Bickerton, whose colorful, hard-edged paintings and mixed-media works, wittily skewering consumerist culture with deadpan aplomb, arrived with a splash in the New York art world in the mid-’80s. In recent years, Bickerton, although revered by many young artists, was living in Bali and had mostly receded from the mainstream. Offered a show at O’Flaherty’s, he cheerily accepted.

When the exhibition opened, at the beginning of 2022, Bickerton was already suffering from ALS, which would cut short his life that November. Gagosian attended the show and wound up representing him. “It was in a youthful context and with a different crowd seeing his work,” says Vander Weg. “It was a really great pairing. I don’t think it was because of O’Flaherty’s that we represented Ashley Bickerton. It was a concurrence of events, but that was an important factor, because it showed there was an audience for the work that was not a historical audience.”

Did these events lead to Juliano-Villani’s own show at Gagosian? Not in a straight line, but she says the twisty path that culminated in her Chelsea exhibition was preordained. “I’m a very driven person when it comes to my art,” she observes. “I was just manifesting it. I was thinking about this for 10 years.” She had precise ideas on the installation. “She was the preeminent voice in the hanging of the work,” says Vander Weg. “Nothing hung in that show unless she really wanted it to.”

Her ascent is propelled by the tension between the slapdash and the relentless. The most talked-about O’Flaherty’s show so far has been “The Patriot,” held in the summer of 2022. It was the last event at the gallery’s original location, just after they lost the lease and shortly before they moved to a more central East Village home, on Avenue A. “We were really angry at the world,” she says.

They devoted most of the gallery to an exhibition of art that came through open submissions, one per artist. All in all, there were 1,128 pieces, made by everyone from Cecily Brown and Rob Pruitt to complete unknowns. With that many participants, it was a vehicle made for Instagram, and the opening party was so crowded that the police shut it down. The room was kept dark, with flashlights supplied to those attending (Marcel Duchamp had come up with a similar arrangement for a Surrealist show in 1938) as everyone searched out his or her own work on the art-jammed walls. “As Billy says, all garbage needs to touch,” Juliano-Villani remarks.

Complicated as that was to choreograph, the auxiliary show was even more challenging. To contrast with the unlit vanity project, Juliano-Villani and Grant built a back room illuminated by blinding stadium lights, where they planned to exhibit a bisected piano sculpture by Arman (another half-forgotten artist). Then, at the last minute, the loan fell through. Another crisis arose when a robot monkey that Grant had bought in Chinatown and customized with rabbit fur turned out to have too short a battery life to do what they had planned: run about the bright room, twirling on its tail the key to the gallery that the landlord was about to take away. As if that weren’t enough, a burst pipe had destroyed their floors. Lesser spirits might have called off the opening, which was a few days away.

Instead, Grant and Juliano-Villani went to a hardware store to buy four heavy chains, which Grant planned to rig across the room in place of the missing Arman. An object would hang from the chains, but what would that object be? “They had it right by the fucking counter: Brownie Brittle,” Juliano-Villani recounts. “We were hungry.” They bought a bag and consumed the contents, which—as the writing on the back explained—are the crispy bits on the edges of a baked brownie. They suspended the empty package, positioning it carefully so it would look as if it were being stretched in different directions. “The bag was there when we needed it,” says Juliano-Villani.

At the end of August, in the latest installment of its by-the-seat-of-your-pants saga, O’Flaherty’s is scheduled to move once again. The roster of artists they will exhibit still hasn’t been announced, but, in a high-stakes bid, they are pursuing art stars Alex Katz and Matthew Barney, hoping to present them together. “That would be the weird part,” Grant says with a chuckle.

Like Juliano-Villani’s paintings, the gallery gobbles up the culture, past and present, with delectable relish, appropriating with abandon, making what is old seem new and what is current feel weighty. Where it is headed, no one can tell. “You shoot an arrow into the air, and you draw a target around where it lands,” says Grant. “You don’t want to know where it’s going. It’s kind of a ride.”

Hair by Junya Nakashima for Oribe at Streeters; Makeup by Mical Klip for Victoria Beckham Beauty; Photo Assistants: Eduardo Silva, Storm Harper; Fashion Assistant: Maia Wilson; Production Assistant: Dalton Sry; Tailor: Luis Cascante at Altered MGMT.