SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA.- The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art announces Unimaginable Units of Time, a solo exhibition by artist Julia Goodman. On view in the Museum’s Nybak Gallery September 5 – November 30, 2025, this is the artist’s Museum debut. Bay Area–based artist Julia Goodman creates hand-formed paper sculptures from reused textiles, expanding the possibilities of handmade paper through a focus on sustainability, texture, and history. Drawing on the overlooked tradition of gathering rags for papermaking, she collects cotton bedding and t-shirts from family, friends, and thrift stores. These materials—embedded with traces of everyday life—bring forward the unseen labor of women and caretakers, past and present. Goodman tears and pulps the fabrics, forming and pressing them into shapes and textures that recall the moon, the imprint of her gripped hand, and the folds of bedsheets and t-shirts. Colors emerge directly from the original fabrics or by mixing together differently colored fabrics—without dyes or pigments. In recent work, washes of watercolor respond to layered shapes and surfaces in her work.

For her exhibition at SLOMA, Goodman offers tactile, alternative ways to experience time. The wrapped sculpture An Unimaginable Unit of Time, begun in March 2020, marks the personal and collective passing of days during the pandemic. Each day, she formed an imprint of her grip in pulp along strips of torn bedsheets, resulting in a continuous line that ultimately stretched 0.95 miles. In Waning and Waxing, Goodman carves moon phases into large textured calendars, recording the eleven months she mourned her father and, years later, the nine and a half months of her pregnancy. Through handmade materials and labor- intensive rituals, Goodman’s work holds space for cycles of love and loss, connecting us to the rhythms of time.

“Julia Goodman’s work draws on the materiality of handmade paper to reveal stories of memory, care, and resilience. Her practice resonates deeply with SLOMA’s mission to connect contemporary art with lived experience, and we are honored to share her vision with our community.” — Emma Saperstein, Chief Curator, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art

Julia Goodman works at the intersection of papermaking, textiles, sculpture, and painting. Her work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, DePaul Art Museum, Recology San Francisco, and Google. Unimaginable Units of Time marks her first solo museum exhibition at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. Recent group exhibitions include the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, DePaul Art Museum, Poetry Foundation, and the Berkeley Art Center. She was selected for the 2020 Women to Watch Award by the San Francisco Advocacy for the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Goodman earned an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BA in International Relations and Peace C Justice Studies from Tufts University. She teaches papermaking at CCA and leads workshops throughout the Bay Area, including at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Exploratorium, and NIAD. She lives in the Bay Area with artist Michael Hall and their family.