By Laura Raskin

Julia Sherman was the only artist in the metal shop in Prentis Hall, a former milk bottling plant on West 125th Street that now houses Columbia University’s visual arts studios. It was an early morning in November and Sherman — diminutive but not fragile, dark hair snipped close to the nape of her neck — put on a smock, safety goggles and plastic earmuffs. Rusty machines, drills, lockers, and rows of vices hibernated around us. A sign on the shop door alerted students that no one was allowed to work without supervision. A white dry erase board waited: “Please list any problems.”

Sherman picked up a torch as if it were a crayon and began smoothing the joints in a two-and-a-half-foot high metal stand that looked like the thing you adjust for height on an outdated Nautilis machine. She nearly put her face in the stream of sparks that spat and dissolved. “They’re not dangerous,” said Sherman, a first-year visual arts M.F.A. candidate at Columbia. She had only received five minutes of an introduction to welding by school staff.

The metal thing was part of a rope machine that Sherman was making for a curated, dance-based event featuring herself and about two dozen other performance artists in a Bushwick loft on December 4. She watched YouTube videos of handmade rope machines at craft fairs for clues about how to make her own and envisioned that the final piece would involve two people working the machine to turn fiber into rope. She has been apprenticing with wigmakers and hasn’t been sure where that will lead her, but is fascinated by what wigs mean in and out of the Jewish religion: grotesqueness, beauty, sexuality, gender, fetish, craft, the sacred and secular. (One of Sherman’s apprenticeships is with a scheitel macher in Borough Park, Brooklyn, who cuts, styles and washes wigs for Orthodox Jewish women. Another is with Tom Watson, who runs the wig department at the Metropolitan Opera. And at the end of December Sherman was in Peru visiting Daniele Sullivan, a wigmaker there who taught a one-day course that Sherman took in Brooklyn. Her project with Sullivan will end up in the online journal Triple Canopy.) Somehow the wigs led Sherman to rope. Back in her studio and sitting on the floor, she brushed polyurethane on two round wooden discs the size of Frisbees. “Rope is the industrial, masculine version,” she said.

***

Born in New York City and raised mostly on the Upper East Side by an artist mother and businessman father, Sherman graduated from the Dalton School, one of the city’s prestigious prep schools, where she felt removed from most of her classmates and their summer-in-the-Hamptons jostling. She spent one year at Oberlin College before transferring to the Rhode Island School of Design where she thrived, graduating with a B.F.A. in photography in 2006. She also studied at Brown University where she took courses in women’s studies, modern culture and media. Sherman, 26, is prolific and driven. She uses multiple media, including photography, video and sculpture, and ties them together with performance. Since 2005, her work has been included in roughly 30 exhibitions in between and on both coasts. She founded and directed a gallery and performance space in Los Angeles where she moved after college. She’s not an “art star,” and said she has no interest in being one. Yet her deep knowledge of her predecessors, peers and influencers, her chilled, polite reserve, and her prescient work might make her one anyways.

“I think she’s very current, but I don’t think she’s trendy,” said Rachel Smith, a childhood friend of Sherman’s and a director at Bonni Benrubi, a gallery on 57th Street specializing in 20th century and contemporary photography, where Sherman’s work has been exhibited. “I think that she has a purism outside of working to sell. I think a lot of young artists [before the economy crashed] were incredibly focused on [selling].” Sherman’s discomfort with the market doesn’t mean her work isn’t made for it. “Her projects are incredibly perfect for galleries,” said Smith. If Sherman keeps moving so deftly between mediums, “it will be there for her.”

A piece called “Comfortable Shoes” (2009), a single green leather pump lying on its side on a gallery floor, was an installation and a photograph. Sherman made the shoe while apprenticing with a cobbler. A short 16-millimeter film and the resulting still images called “Mother of All” (2008), in which Sherman spins wool in a moonlit forest, is a meditation on spinsterhood and sexual prowess. In “Untitled Weaving Installation” (2008), Sherman used a traditional loom to weave female relatives’ lingerie and silk stockings into a wall hanging. Many of Sherman’s artist friends, peers and mentors see her as a feminist artist. “When I was talking with her and I knew she was doing this work with the wigmakers I said, ‘Oh, you’re looking at both ends of the body,’” said Mary Walling Blackburn, a friend, writer and the founder of a residency that Sherman did in Marfa, Texas this summer called The Anhoek School. “‘Why do you keep going to these extremes of the body?’ When I met her it was the shoes [and now] it’s the hair. … So she moves things both towards the sexed and away from the sexed simultaneously.”

Sherman said her work begins with her experience, and most of it is a testament to her own and other women’s. Still, the striking line through in all of it is an obsession and fascination with the pathology of craft, particularly women’s work, what women make and wear, the slough produced by pathetic or transcendent toil. “A lot of my focus ends up going toward craft, especially right now,” Sherman told me in her studio the first time we met. “I’m aware of my own romanticization of a craftsperson as opposed to an artist and how that feels somehow uncomplicated and how problematic it is to be thinking that way.” Folk art — craft — is made by ordinary people in the context of their lives. Sherman’s obsessions are not with art for art’s sake. They are with what is later claimed as art.

Feminist art’s entanglement with craft is nothing new, of course. They came together memorably in the early 1970s, as the Women’s Liberation movement found a tributary into the art world. Artist-activist Judy Chicago was teaching a generation of young female artists to challenge the male-dominated art establishment. Chicago’s students used typically feminine media like domestic objects, craft, performance, and feminine hygiene products to subvert mainstream ideas about sexuality, gender and art theory. Faith Wilding, an artist associated with Chicago, made a room-sized crocheted enclosure in 1972 called “Womb Room”; Sherman made “A Room-A Loom” in 2009, which spanned the length of a gallery room and invited people to weave in materials of their choosing. In Wilding’s era, needlework meant “enforced femininity,” she told the New York Times in 1995. In Sherman’s, it’s a relic, a hobby. Is “A Room-A Loom” a blues song for a kind of physical labor that educated, intellectual women no longer need to do? “Sherman’s work does cover so much ground and it deals with a lot of issues very directly, like feminism, and a discourse about gender,” said Jon Kessler, a mixed media artist and one of Sherman’s professors at Columbia. “[Her work] deals with spectacle and what it’s like to be living in a society when you don’t own your own emotions and reactions to things and in some ways are almost being scripted.”

***

I met with Sherman a handful of times over the course of a month when she could spare an hour between the demands of Columbia’s program and her work on the rope machine. She was willing to be interviewed, not eager. She expressed more than once her discomfort with the celebrity and self-promotion that accompanies much of the art world. “I’m not really psyched about the self-promotion aspect of being an artist,” she said. At different times: “I don’t believe that art is the salvation always,” and “I don’t want to be a little art factory and I also don’t want everything to be a finished product.” A piece on her website, “Seen” (2007-ongoing) is a series of photographs in which she Photoshopped her face on the bodies of other women posing with art stars at parties. “Artist Julia Sherman with Larry Gagosian.” He’s kissing her cheek. “Artist Julia Sherman and Richard Serra.” He’s talking about one of his sheet metal assemblages, maybe. “Artist Julia Sherman with Cindy Sherman and David Byrne.” It’s front row at Fashion Week 2008. It’s obvious commentary on the gallery opening photos that fill pages in glossy art and design magazines. “Everyone I know hates openings. It feels silly, obligatory, nobody’s looking at the art and everybody’s just looking at each other,” said Sherman.

***

Before nine on another morning a week or so after I saw Sherman in the metal shop, I went to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend and sometime-collaborator Adam Katz on West 121st Street. Katz was away in California. The two met when Sherman was at RISD and he was studying art semiotics at Brown University. Sherman greeted me at the door explaining that she was in the midst of training their cat to use the toilet instead of the litter box. Sun filled the spacious, railroad style apartment and plants nearly obscured the windows and windowsills that looked out onto the street. Sherman was eager to show me one that perched on an end table like a piece of abstract sculpture and didn’t need water (an air plant) and another called a staghorn fern that was mounted on the wall like its name suggests. (Her friend Cammie Staros, an L.A.-based artist and curator, told me that Sherman gardens “just as enthusiastically and frantically as she makes [art].”) Tattoos were visible on Sherman’s wrists. On the left, a cupcake the size of a dime — blue frosting, pink cake. On the right, her grandmother’s monogram. When I asked Sherman over email to explain the tattoos, she wrote back, “I’d rather not talk to much about the tattoos,” but her grandmother “inspires me to be a strong, independent woman, to cultivate meaningful friendships and to always keep learning. The cupcake is a document of my first encounters with 3rd wave feminism. I was excited.”

Sherman had previously told me that life in L.A. came with a gratifying and rich connection to a vibrant DIY art scene and community, but she had returned to New York City and school this fall because she wanted a new challenge. “I grew up [in New York City] and I think I got exposure to the art world a little too early in terms of the social aspect of it,” said Sherman. “And so I went through a crisis for a while of not really wanting to be an artist … I just never had the feeling that this was a place I could be creative, whether it was because I was overwhelmed by the amount of art — and you know, everyone’s hustling here and for me that kinds of spins me into an existential crisis pretty easily.” Being uptown at Columbia has given her the distance she needs.

Now, in her living room, I wanted to hear more about growing up with a brother — Zack Sherman, 29, a film and television producer in L.A. — and father who taught her aggressive assertiveness from a young age. The two men’s professional worlds — business and Hollywood — demand different hierarchy than the collective and encouraging one that many young artists inhabit. Sherman delicately explained that she has had to learn to temper some of that well-learned edge. Blackburn, Sherman’s friend from the Marfa residency, described Sherman as “very soft in her demeanor … and I think that could mislead some people because actually she’s very precise and aware and sharp.” I wouldn’t have described Sherman as “soft,” granted I spent much less time in her presence than Blackburn has. Instead I witnessed the precision as well as a fierce self-assuredness.

By phone, I asked Sherman’s father, Mark, to talk about the message his daughter had clearly absorbed. It was 8 a.m. on a weekday and he sounded as if he’d been caffeinated for several hours already. “Having a daughter at a very young age, I told her, ‘Look, there is nothing you can’t do that a man can do, and do it better. You should never be thwarted by your sexuality. I felt very strongly about it. I wanted her to grow up with that sense of entitlement. I was very strong about it. I didn’t let her get dissuaded or discouraged easily.” He credited his wife, Joan Sherman, with introducing Sherman and Zack to art when they were still in the stroller. Sherman called her mother’s art more “formal” and “internal” than her own and said that they have mutual respect for each other’s practice. Because of Joan, a painter, sculptor and furniture designer, Sherman saw at an early age that being an artist was possible. In L.A., she began experimenting with sculpture and performance. “She did extremely unusual shows [at RISD],” said Mark. “One of her professors said to me, ‘Everyone’s gonna hear about her.’ She’s a very, very serious competitor.”

***

When Sherman lived in L.A., she made rent with gigs as a still photographer on film and television sets. Zack was producing horror movies at the time and hired her to photograph three of them. “Some of the work she did was unbelievable. I’ve never seen a still photographer … turn what was going on, on set, into art,” he said. His parents have a shot she took on the set of “Otis,” a 2008 horror film, hanging in their house in Connecticut. A bare bulb lights the actor Kevin Pollak. He’s shown from the chest up, wearing a white sleeveless undershirt. His head is arced back and to the right and blood sprays out of his mouth as if he were a sprinkler.

As Sherman wandered freely on sets she became fascinated by extras, many of whom don’t want to be famous actors and live for their five-second background shot. She made a video called “The Audience Reacts” (2008), simulating extras’ experience of being asked to churn out a range of emotions as a crowd in a ten-minute period — cheering and excited, sad, scared. It’s an awkward watch, knowing the actors are over-reacting to nothing. “The Audience Reacts” nods to the early 20th century Russian silents and the birth of the montage. Soviet filmmaker and teacher Lev Kuleshov had his students splice up footage of actor Ivan Mozzhukhin — it’s the same shot, but he’s hungry, then happy, then sad. Kuleshov’s student Vsevelod Pudovkin then made “Chess Fever” (1925), which jumps between shots of chess stars playing a game on a stage and the audience observing expectantly or dispassionately. In every case, we’re voyeurs of voyeurs.

The first time we met in her studio, Sherman said that she feels she’s a painfully perceptive and constant reader of body language, noticing details like who someone looks at immediately after they speak. Body language is her personal dog whistle. “It’s horrible to be around a lot of people,” she said, “especially in L.A. because everything is like, ‘cringe.’” (Suddenly I was uncomfortably aware of my own performance and body language — why am I sitting with my right arm across my lap, clutching my left below the elbow?)

Being watched and watching is central to Sherman’s work. She has a background in gymnastics and ballet and she believes that her training, and performance in general, is an enormous influence — “what it means to present yourself. And I think a lot of that originated for me from a very typical adolescent feminine experience and trying to deal with my own feelings about being watched or feeling that every day is a performance or a failed performance or what it means to fail at a performance.” Her videos “Don’t Forget to Smile” (2006), Sherman’s thesis show at RISD, and “Tap Happy” (2004) investigate young girls’ quest for the perfect performance. When she danced with the junior company at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in high school Sherman was “resistant to certain modern dance practices,” she said. “At that point it was all about beauty, grace, perfection and control. I wasn’t ready to question that.”

The work Sherman is most proud of is “Cone of Power,” a 2008 performance and installation in which she taught friends to weave and then had them do so for eight hours in the Phyllis Stein Art gallery in L.A. Sherman made six backstrap looms, common in Mexico and Central America, which hooked on to a central rope connected to the ceiling and were pulled taught by their connection to each weaver sitting on a stool. “I realized afterwards that I had orchestrated something that was really meaningful to those who participated,” Sherman wrote in an email. “I think the piece successfully toyed with the my desire/impulse to control the making/aesthetics of the piece and the entropy/mutiny of the group. ” Mia Locks, an artist and writer, met Sherman a few years ago in L.A. At the time, Sherman was making a prosthetic pregnant body with silicone breasts and a belly for an installation called “In Search of a Queen” (2007). Locks took photos of Sherman wearing the prosthesis, “which was really funny and very intimate immediately,” she said. Locks said that Sherman wrestles with over-thinking her work. She called Sherman “a little bit of a control freak.” “She’s started to let go a little and experiment a little,” said Locks. She referenced “Cone of Power.” “That was impossible to know in advance. It was a really big jump for her in her work. She had to lose a little bit of the control. A loss of control for her was sort of terrifying in a way. It was sort of the best part for the rest of us.”

***

The loft was on a residential street in Bushwick. It was a Friday night in December. About 100 people stood on the periphery of the massive room, watching female dancers in pale white and pink two-piece leotards. Or maybe it was underwear. I couldn’t see very well. The loft was barely lit, with only a few floodlights placed strategically on the floor. People were here for the “AUNTS Roadshow,” dancers performing pieces consecutively and simultaneously for a relaxed audience that looked to be made up mostly of people in their 20s and 30s. To the right of the dancers, running the length of the loft – maybe 100 feet – was Sherman’s rope machine. Katz, who was back from California, was on one end, cranking the wooden plates I had seen Sherman staining. The plates were attached to the metal stand. Three pieces of twine extended from hooks on the wooden plate that Katz — lean, bald, bearded — was turning all the way down to the other end of the room where Sherman was twisting the three pieces of twine and adding bits of horsehair into it as she went. The twine ran parallel to the floor and ceiling and was prevented from drooping at its nadir by a swing that Sherman had attached to the ceiling and fashioned out of twine and wood.

Twisting the twine meant that Sherman was doing a sort of slow, rhythmic, repetitive dance toward Katz. Performances kept happening in the larger space of the loft. Compared to the rope machine, they seemed thrown together, amateur. But the rope machine was lulling, in the same way it is meditative to watch someone knit, needles clicking over each other, or to have one’s hair tightly braided. People, beers in hand and talking, kept bumping their hips into the twine, or mistakenly lifting the strands up and ducking under, not realizing it was a performance. Some crowded close to the twine to watch other performances, or around Sherman at one end or Katz at the other, wanting to know how the process worked, how Sherman had made it. The rope machine spanned the length of the room, a tightrope, or what a child might make in the woods if left with a few materials and an afternoon. I told Sherman that I thought the piece and people’s reactions to it lacked preciousness. “I kind of like it,” she said. The rope machine had a gravitational pull on the rest of the room. When I had visited Sherman in her studio weeks before she had said, “I really wanted this piece to relate back to the body.” It did.

The rope machine in action reminded me of what Blackburn had said about Sherman’s work, that “you can see very clearly what she’s borrowing from minimalism.” Blackburn also said, “There’s this way that [Sherman] manages to just be buoyed by her own interests. I think that’s a really smart emotional position. People need to have smart emotional positions negotiating art worlds that function as they do. And some people protect themselves in ways that are damaging to themselves or others. What’s really nice is that she doesn’t operate that way.”

Racers in Prospect Park on Saturday, October 24, 2009.

I was going to be late. I didn’t get up early enough. My half of a whole wheat bagel with peanut butter and banana felt like it was lodged in my esophagus. I didn’t make one last bathroom stop. It was 7:50 a.m. The race was starting at 8. I was half of a mile from the start and I still needed to drop off my backpack at the bus that would meet us at the finish. My backpack contained a dry shirt, a water-resistant shell and extra goo, all post-race necessities. “Goo” comes in palm-sized rectangular foil packages that are impossible to tear open with sweaty hands. The anxiety this can provoke in the middle of a race – I need fuel right now, RIGHT NOW – makes me feel instantly faint; the relief and stamina that the sugary, slippery substance can provide might as well be on the inside of Gramercy Park’s locked gate, so close and inaccessible. The trick is to make a tiny tear in the package before the race, but not big enough to allow it to leak into the pocket of my lined running shorts. Goo is the consistency of the gel frosting that Carvel uses to write “Congratulations!” in cursive on its ice cream cakes.

This particular ten-kilometer running race was sponsored by Nike and held in Prospect Park on Saturday. Nike calls it the The Human Race. It’s an annual event with races taking place in 25 countries on the same day. Instead of passing out Tyvek race numbers, Nike provides Human Racers with identical, synthetic, sweat-wicking t-shirts. Our individual numbers were printed in yellow on the shirts. The race date, “10-24-09,” was also branded there, like a reminder of apocalypse or a horror movie release.

Not surprisingly, Nike had done lacquered marketing for the race, pointing entrants to an unhelpful but beautiful website that featured photographs of toned runners mid-stride in Milan or Berlin. (Read: We are all part of the human race and we are all running the Human Race!) I picked up my race packet at Niketown on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, the juice-colored gear cooing promises of better split times. The pre-race presence of Swoosh was grating.

But then I was running. I was in the race. The morning had been rainy and it was still overcast. The foliage popped against the gelatin print sky. Ahead of me were the backs of hundreds of runners all wearing the same primary red t-shirts. They streamed around the curve in the road. We looked like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates, set in motion and fluttering in crimson instead of saffron. We were in bas-relief to the park.

Running races are like therapy sessions held en masse and outdoors. Running is largely a sport defined by the individual. Its fuel – its “goo” – are personal rituals, neuroses, preferences, wishes. Its boundaries are defined by an individual’s weight, height, muscle tone, mood, attitude, genes, training, and ability to convert fuel to energy and maximize oxygen. Normally, all of this becomes a slurry of one’s own making: 6 a.m. or noon, a glass of water or juice and half of a banana, a threadbare cotton t-shirt or compression tights, the Dirty Projectors or an inner monologue about an argument the night before. Runners indulge specificity and the self. At a race, neuroses get a stage. We observe each other’s ticks and read anxieties. We take part in a false battle, charging ahead as group in order to feel part of a group, but with as many individual enemies as we are runners. For 46:32 or 1:06 or 3:36 we are alone together, spitting, or breathing loudly, or imagining we are water over stone, water over stone, like the Tao says. After the finish line, public catharsis and coffee. Or Gatorade.