Juli Raja: BEAUTY PARTY

A unique holiday shopping event

November 16, 2024 | 11am-6pm

November 17, 2024 | 12pm-5pm

Fiendish Plots proudly presents Beauty Party by Juli Raja. Beauty Party is a title borrowed from Juli's long-time friend & musician, Mike Ladd. This is a fair description of how she has directed her creative energy since childhood. She was described as hyperactive in the 70‘s. A behavior sometimes penalized, but in her case, it became a gift for her type of creative outlet. Juli has a sharp idea of what is beautiful to her, and from a young age has been enticed by the calming effects of tunneling into the making of intricate, repetitive, centrifugal patterns. Juli’s influences in her youth included William Morris, Gustav Klimt and a fascination with Psychedelia. If you asked her to show you her “rules to live by” she would present you with Owen Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament. While studying at the Art Institute of Dallas, she was admonished by some professors for “making everything the size of a postage stamp.” In her twenties Juli explored Persian miniatures from ancient manuscripts, Indian Court paintings, and Islamic tile design. There is a confluence of all these practices in her contemporary work; layered on top is comedy and joy.

The paintings presented in Beauty Party are an extension of New York-based artist; Juli’s 16-year career as a textile & collections designer for the label: Juli Raja hand built. Elaborate & intricate processes play the pivotal role in the making of her textiles. The woven fabric is created on a grid, as are her paintings. The woodblocks used in her print designs are hand carved from her original drawings by highly skilled artisans in two Indian cities--Kolkata & Jaipur. The method by which these 6-inch square woodblocks are dipped into assigned dyes, pressed onto the fabric and repeated is a precise mathematical system, resulting in a one-of-a-kind fluid print. Accuracy, placement, and proportion are essential to allow your eyes to move effortlessly across the surface. Juli’s appreciation for the balance between ingenuity and tradition in her work is an expression of her love and hopes for the interconnected human-animal worlds of togetherness. The characters and locations she creates in both her paintings and woodblock printed textiles are derived from her own life experiences. For every wildlife reserve or historically significant architectural city she has explored, there is a memory she taps into to curate many of the visual components that are the building blocks of her myth-poetic, story-based paintings. As with visual influences, the auditory rhythm of music is also present. Within this exhibition of paintings & textile collections, Juli invites you to associate a particular musical artist or a song with the work.

See: Spotify playlist called “beauty party paintings”

Hand Built History

I’ve created my label, Juli Raja Hand Built, with a bit of serendipity and a whole lot of love.

Almost 50 years ago, a young couple, Dilip and Nandita Raja, started Kanishka’s, a block printing studio from their living room in Kolkata, to design sarees for modern Indian women using their original drawings. This extraordinary labor of love has since grown into a textile-design institution, whose innovations are prized and whose creations are valued as collector’s items all over India.

I was a 3-year old in Texas at the time, with no idea that I would one day meet and eventually marry their son, Kanishka Raja. But I had already begun assembling the pieces that would define my lifelong passions: a profound love of ornament, a deep fondness for animals, and a very peculiarly skewed sense of humor! At age 10, while drawing at the kitchen table, when my mother asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I answered, “make prints for clothing.” My idea of endless fun was working on intricate patterns, adding multiple colors and designs, filling up pages with everything I could imagine.

Fast forward to 2001, long after I had studied design and illustration and was still casting about for the perfect vehicle for my dreams: I traveled to India to meet my future in-laws, expressed an interest in their work and asked for a tour of their workshop. I fell in immediate and permanent love of course, not only with the brilliant originality of their designs, but with the whole, elaborate creativity of the process by which their rich imaginations are brought into being. Dilip Raja, quickly recognizing our shared love of illustration, offered to have one of my drawings cut into a woodblock. I happily refer to this first block “Honeycomb” as my gateway print. It fills me with pride and pleasure every time I notice that it remains one of the most popular new prints in the Kanishka’s catalog.

I began slowly: absorbing everything, learning the ropes, gradually introducing my own sensibilities into the mix and I haven’t looked back since. What you see on the website, in my store in New York, and in the thousands of unique pieces I’ve created since I began in earnest in 2006, are the fruits of this collaborative process.

Each year, a few of my original drawings are added to Kanishka’s 4,000-plus print library. Then, with the help of our skilled woodblock printers, short runs of fabric are hand-printed in our workshop to create limited edition collections that rarely exceed 25 pieces per color or print design. The beautifully tailored results feature my signature hybrid of traditional and contemporary design, to make clothes that keep alive centuries-old craft techniques while maintaining their modern aesthetics.

www.juliraja.com/