BIO
Faculty
Dr. Julie Hollenbach (she/her)
Assistant Professor
Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture
Craft Chair (January 1 - June 30, 2026)
CONTACT INFORMATION
jhollenbach@nscad.ca
Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture
Background
Dr. Julie Hollenbach is a queer white-settler cultural historian and curator born in unceded Syilx territory, now living in unceded Mi’kmaq territory where she is an Assistant Professor of Craft History and Material Cultures. She received her PhD from Queen’s University (2017) for her SSHRC funded research, “The Social Practice of Crafting: Gender, Race, and Class in Western Craft.” This research expanded considerations of amateur and professional craft as a gendered and classed activity, to explicitly analyze how craft is a racializing process that enshrines whiteness: tracing craft’s use in the 19th-century Canadian settler colonial project as a “civilizing” process that simultaneously inculcated whiteness and correct gender comportment in settler girls and women, while attempting to domesticate/erase Indigenous girls and women and their culture. This project traced these roots to 20th-century and contemporary amateur craft culture, presenting a critical race analysis that interrogated the associations between femininity, middle-class social position, and whiteness within domestic crafts, leisure practices, and lifestyle activism (“craftivism”). This analysis assessed how amateur crafting practices are tied fundamentally to the maker’s sense of self, and how that self is connected to local and global social formations, and as such, is powerfully agentic in creating culture and social and political spaces.
CURRENT RESEARCH AND/OR CREATIVE PRACTICE
Dr. Hollenbach’s interdisciplinary scholarly, creative, and curatorial work uses queer, feminist, disability, critical race (critical settler/critical whiteness) methodologies to consider craft, design, art and material culture at the intersections of function and meaning, place and time, histories and communities, practice and tradition.
Dr. Hollenbach’s current research focuses on cultural production (craft, design, art) and how people engage with it as users, consumers, and museum visitors. One of Dr. Hollenbach’s current projects considers the colonial imperative in European and Settler-North American craft and design through a consideration of the extractive and exploitative logic embedded in past and present practices. This includes a consideration of the appropriation of non-western culture, materials, and techniques in craft and design, and a practice of entitled use without credit, reciprocity, or accountability. Ultimately, the project spends time with questions about the values and ethics of contemporary practices of creation and consumption.
Another area of Dr. Hollenbach’s current research analyzes contemporary craft practices and culture—both professional and amateur—that function as a dog whistle for regressive values and narratives. For example, amateur domestic craft’s centrality within “tradwife” culture and media as a powerful symbol of conservative family values, traditional gender roles, and a white-supremacist racial purity logic. In this context, amateur domestic craft is interrogated as a trojan horse for toxic white femininity. Another example: studio craft makers that draw on strong narratives of nationalism to situate their contemporary practices, grounding their craft in nostalgic associations of mastery, tradition, and authenticity that harken back to and desire to revitalize an imagined “lost golden age.”
Courses taught
- AHIS 2120 “Craft & Design History: 1750–1950”
- AHIS 3160 “20th Century Craft”
- AHIS 3123 “Contemporary Craft”
- AHIS 3117 “Art of Failure” (Always Online!)
- AHIS 4513 “Food Craft Culture”
- AHIS 4110 “Primary Research Methods”
- MFAR 6260 “Material Practices and Knowledges”
SIGNIFICANT PUBLICATIONS/EXHIBITIONS
Select publications
Soon – “The Colonial Imperative in French Art Deco Design: Considering the Impact of Histories and Museum Displays on Contemporary Designers and Consumers,” in Home/Making, eds. Elaine Cheasley-Patterson and Molly-Claire Gillet (London: Bloomsbury Press).
2024 – Julie Hollenbach, “Shadow Archives and Legacies of Creative Material Practice,” in Studio Magazine (Spring/Summer 2024): 42–47.
Hyperlink: https://www.studiomagazine.ca/articles/2024/1/shadow-archives-and-legacies
2023 – Julie Hollenbach, “The Seeds of an Orange: Meditations on Reverberations and Cultural Sovereignty in the Craftwork of Tyshan Wright,” In Handmade Assembly (Sackville, NB: Strutts ARC).
Hyperlink: https://owensartgallery.com/owens/a-handmade-assembly-publication/
2023 – Julie Hollenbach, “Emily Lawrence’s Food Dreams,” in Visual Arts News “Craft” (Spring 2023): 14–18.
Hyperlink: https://visualartsnews.ca/2023/02/emily-lawrences-food-dreams/
2022 – Julie Hollenbach, “Curating the Living Room: A Queer Feminist Decolonial Intervention in Public and Private Spaces,” In PUBLIC, Special Issue (Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies for Decolonizing Futures) (2022).
Hyperlink: https://publicjournal.ca/product/64-beyond-unsettling/
2021 – Julie Hollenbach and Robin McDonald, eds., ReImagining Depression: Creative Approaches to Feeling Bad (London: Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2021).
Hyperlink: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-80554-8#toc
2020 – Julie Hollenbach and Carla Taunton, “Unsettling Settler Possession,” in Visual Arts News (Fall 2020).
Hyperlink: http://visualartsnews.ca/2020/10/unsettling-settler-possession/
2019 – Julie Hollenbach, “Moving Beyond a Modern Craft: Thoughts on White Entitlement and Cultural Appropriation in Professional Craft in Canada,” in Studio Magazine (Spring/Summer 2019).
Hyperlink: https://www.studiomagazine.ca/articles/2019/moving-beyond-a-modern-craft
2019 – Julie Hollenbach, “Art and Stuff: How Spaces Structure Our Engagement with Objects,” in Sitelines (Halifax, NS: Eyelevel ARC, 2019).
Hyperlink: http://eyelevel.art/sitelines-collection-essays-poems-and-case-studies-itinerant-art
2018 – Julie Hollenbach, “In the Body: 10 Artists Who Use Pleasure to Defy and Subvert,” in Canadian Art (Winter 2018).
Hyperlink: https://canadianart.ca/features/10-artists-who-use-pleasure-to-defy-and-subvert/
Select curatorial projects, presentations, and facilitation
2024 – Presentation: “Troubling white Benevolence in Craftivism and white Feminist Activism.” Cape Breton Centre for Craft, Sydney, Nova Scotia.
Hyperlink: https://www.instagram.com/capebretoncraft/p/C4fs_JsMqDA/
2023 – Curator: Tyshan Wright: Maroon Town. MSVU Art Gallery, Mount St. Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Hyperlink: https://www.msvuart.ca/exhibition/tyshan-wright-maroon-town/
2023 – Presentation: “Toward Future Bodies: Reflections on the Raphael Yu Collection of Contemporary Canadian Ceramics.” Toward Future Bodies symposium, Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Ontario, 9 June.
Hyperlink: https://www.gardinermuseum.on.ca/wp-content/uploads/ICAF-2023-Symposium-Online-Schedule.pdf
2022 – Panelist: “Encounters: Challenging Limits–A Conversation on Inclusion in Canadian Craft.” Virtual Roundtable presented by artsUNITE and Studio Magazine: Shiemara Hogarth, Karyn Recollet, Julie Hollenbach, moderated by Nehal El-Hadi. 29 January.
Hyperlink: https://www.studiomagazine.ca/publications/2022/encounters-challenging-limits
2022 – Keynote presentation: Julie Hollenbach, Robin Alex McDonald, and Justice Walz, “Everyday Altars.” International Women’s Week annual lecture series. Virtual keynote presentation and workshop. Nipissing University.
Hyperlink: https://www.nipissingu.ca/events/iww-2022-everyday-altars
2022 – “Museums,” Victorian Samplings Podcast, Season 3, episode 2, Fall 2022
Hyperlink: https://www.craftingcommunities.net/s3e2-museums
2021 – Symposium Presentation: “Tending to Craft: Unsettling Methodologies for Craft Research and Creation.” Craft Ways 2021: Tending to Craft. Virtual Symposium. Center for Craft and Warren Wilson College.
Hyperlink: https://www.centerforcraft.org/craft-ways-2021
2021 – Podcast episode: Julie Hollenbach and Carla Taunton, “Decolonization, Settler Responsibility, and Treaty Principles.” CAA Conversations Podcast. 15 March 2021.
2020 – Conference presentation: “Whose Personal is Political?: Troubling Privileged Affect in White Feminist Craftivism.” Textile Society of America (TSA) virtual symposium. Boston, Massachusetts.
Hyperlink: https://youtu.be/PK_Pp_KaESY?t=1907
Symposium session overview (by Emily J. Oertling): https://textilesocietyofamerica.org/10840/symposium-session-review-connection-and-misconnections-the-benefits-and-pitfalls-of-craftivism-a-review-of-session-6c-individual-papers-craftivism
2020 – Facilitator: “We Regret to Inform You,” speakers series featuring Merray Gerges, Kaashif Ghanie, Masuma Khan, Tara Taylor, Charvel Rappos. Centre for Art Tapes, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Hyperlink: https://www.cfat.ca/news/discussion
2020 – Curator: “For the Love of Sandra Alfoldy,” exhibition, Anna Leonowens Gallery, NSCAD University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Hyperlink: http://theanna.nscad.ca/update-for-the-love-of-sandra-alfoldy-online-showcase/
2020 – Co-curator: with Dr. Sandra Alfoldy and Shannon Parker, “Good Red Earth: The Pots and Passion of Walter Ostrom,” Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Hyperlink: https://www.artgalleryofnovascotia.ca/exhibitions/walterostromgoodearth
2018 – Curator: “Unpacking the Living Room,” MSVU Art Gallery, Mount St. Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Hyperlink: https://www.msvuart.ca/exhibition/unpacking-the-living-room/