Yulia Pinkusevich is an artist and educator born in Kharkiv, Ukraine (USSR). Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, her family fled the eastern block as refugees, immigrating to New York City. She later relocated to California first to attend college and later graduate school, continuing to reside in the San Francisco Bay Area to this day. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Stanford University and Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts. Yulia has exhibited nationally and internationally including projects in Paris, France, Buenos Aires, Argentina, London, UK and Athens,Greece.
Yulia works primarily in drawing, painting and installation. She creates projects and large-scale environments that consider our ecological and social systems. Her work observes land and environment critically, focusing on the psychology of space while exploring visible and psychological environments sentient beings inhabit. Using art as a vehicle to merge the physical and psychological parallels, she explores the sentiments of our non-human kin and the life force of elemental beings like fire and water.
Her background itself is rooted in change. Born and raised in the USSR at a time of great political upheaval and uncertainty, her work stems from her identity as an immigrant of Siberian & Ukrainian roots. Her art explores dualities and the complex relationships between her blended identity and home countries. Formally, the work is engaged with the direct experience of the viewer through perspectival illusion and spatial perception that play with the subconscious and cognitive understanding of space. By breaking logical perspectives, she creates illusions of impossible spaces, non-places or utopias that shift the viewpoint to the panoptic.
Yulia’s art is in the public collection of the deYoung Museum, Stanford University, Kiev History Museum, Mills College Art Museum, City of Albuquerque, Google and Meta, amongst others. She was a 2024 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Other fellowships include Gray Area Arts Foundation, Wildlands, Lucid Arts Foundation, Autodesk Pier 9, Recology, Cite des Arts International Paris, Headlands Center for the Arts, Vashon AIR and many others. Yulia has lectured at Stanford University and is currently an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Northeastern University in Oakland, California.