Distinguished Alumna
Julie Sasse, PhD (Art History and Education, 2013)
The University of Arizona School of Art Advisory Board is pleased to invite you to a Distinguished Alumni Award presentation and reception honoring Dr. Julie Sasse.
Dr. Julie Sasse is Chief Curator at the Tucson Museum of Art (TMA) with a specialty in modern and contemporary art. Sasse is interested in new perspectives on traditional themes and mediums, art of the American Southwest, and the intersection between nature and society and science and art. Since joining TMA, she has organized more than 100 group and solo exhibitions and has written more than 40 publications about diverse subjects and artists, including hybridity and the environment, Indigenous art, LatinX art, contemporary art of the Southwest, and women artists. In 2020, she released her book, Southwest Rising: Contemporary Art and the Legacy of Elaine Horwitch, published by Cattle Track Press and the Tucson Museum of Art. She also recently contributed a chapter in the recently released Bob ‘Daddy-O’ Wade’s Book of Big-Ass Art, published by Texas A&M University Press and a monograph for Patrick Mehaffey.
Among the group exhibitions Sasse organized are Dress Matters: Clothing as Metaphor (2017), Body Language: Figuration in Modern and Contemporary Art (2017), Into the Night: Contemporary Art and the Nocturne Tradition (2017), Desert Grasslands (2013), Borderlandia: Cultural Topographies by Einar and Jamex de la Torre (2011), and Trouble in Paradise: Examining Discourse in Nature and Society (2009). Her solo exhibitions include Andy Warhol, Ai Weiwei, Shen Wei, Shu Min Lin, Alan Sonfist, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Henri Matisse, Deborah Butterfield, Ansel Adams, Allan Graham, Dan Collins, Mayme Kratz, Florence Pierce, and Rose Cabat.
Sasse received a Clark Art Institute fellowship in 2008; a Latino Museum Studies Fellowship in Washington, DC, in 2007; a Louise Foucar Marshall Foundation Graduate Fellowship in 2013; and fellowships in 2016 and 2017 at the Women’s International Study Center in Santa Fe.
From 1995 to 2000, Sasse managed five galleries at the University School of Art and the UAZ campus, organizing more than 200 exhibitions, and taught gallery and museum management. In the 1980s, Sasse directed the Elaine Horwitch Galleries in Scottsdale and Sedona, AZ; Santa Fe, NM; and Palm Springs, CA, where she organized more than 300 exhibitions of works by international and regional artists including David Hockney, Frank Stella, Therman Statom, Larry Rivers, Louise Nevelson, Peter Voulkos, and Beatrice Wood.
Sasse has served on numerous panels and jury committees at institutions such as Contemporary Art Center in Las Vegas, Heard Museum in Phoenix, and University of Texas in El Paso. In 2018, she served on a panel and wrote a catalogue essay for Wendy Red Star’s The Maniacs exhibition at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. She maintains a rigorous exhibition schedule and recently opened OLIVIER MOSSET, a feature exhibition of the noted Swiss artist’s work from the past four decades. She will open Brad Kahlhamer: 11:50 to Tucson in March of 2022, an artist listed as one of the top 11 influential Indigenous artists in the online magazine Artsy.