Julie Schenkelberg grew up in the post-industrial landscape of Cleveland, Ohio. Her mixed-media installations start with furniture, dishware, textiles, and marble, combined with concrete, resin, and construction materials, to transform notions of domesticity, and engage with the American Rust Belt's legacy of abandonment and decay. Using  architecture and the home as a playground for formal and conceptual subversions, the work aggressively disrupts cohesion within the physical sphere. Familiar furnishings rekindle memories or premonitions of collapse, suggesting both the utter destruction of war, calamities, or urban decay, but also the uncanny juxtapositions of fragile substances such as cloth and china, with industrial materials such as rusty metal, heavy concrete, and tool-made marks such as drilled holes and chain-sawed indentations.

Schenkelberg is well known for her site-specific works that disrupt and emerge from each location. She was the winner of the 2014 ArtPrize Installation Juried Award for her towering installation “Syptomatic Constant”, which spanned the lobby of the a former bank. 

"In Grand Rapids, I was able to be very close to the Roosevelt Park community because I lived there during the Transmigration project, which involved a house that had been present in the community since 1910. I made a sculpture from the entire house while I lived in a house across the street that had been bought by Habitat for Humanity. The house I was living in was scheduled to be demolished to make space for new housing. I lived there for over a year, renovating it and housing artists with the group Site:Lab. That project built a lot of the sensitivity I take with me now. People in the neighborhood would come up to me and ask what I was doing, so person-to-person relationships developed. The neighbors would ask, “Why do you have this house? Why are you doing this in our neighborhood? Why do you live here?” I would say, “Well, this house is going to be demolished. I was gifted this house and this is what I'm doing with it. I want to transform the history of this house and send it on to the next world.” This reverberated with a lot of people and they loved it."

-- Julie Schenkelberg

"I've had quite a good adventure in getting objects. I've done a couple of shows where there's been an open call for objects. I've given galleries the thesis of the project and they have a day where people bring things that they want to be honored. In Kansas City, we were working in an area where they used to bring all the cattle and we collected material from a two-mile radius only because we wanted the installation to be about that area. For other installations that I’ve created, I've had a vision and a palette and gone to second-hand stores, or I’ve collected things that remind me of what my family would have owned. Sometimes I find the same patterns they’ve had in their homes. Or I collect vintage things that I imagine were ideal to receive when people got married."

-- Julie Schenkelberg

In 2019 Julie Schenkelberg was a Finalist for the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) Burke Prize, and participated in the concurrent exhibition October 19, 2019 - April 20, 2020.

Schenkelberg has created large-scale installations for solo exhibitions at the Red Bull House of Art, Detroit, MI, the Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH, the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA, Projekstrom Normanns, Stravanger, Norway, the Bemis Center, Omaha, NE, the University of Akron Meyers School of Art, OH, Beeler Gallery, OH, Plug Projects, MO, and UNTITLED Miami Beach, FL. In addition, she has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, NY, Volterra-Detroit Foundation, Italy, Art Omi, NY, Oxbow, Saugatuck, MI, and SiTE:LAB, MI.