Julie Green, Artist Who Memorialized Inmates’ Last Suppers, Dies at 60
The New York Times, November 5, 2021: Julie Green, Artist Who Memorialized Inmates’ Last Suppers, Dies at 60
“Six tacos, six glazed doughnuts and a Cherry Coke: That was the last meal of a man executed in Oklahoma in July 1999. Rendered in cobalt blue glaze on a white china plate the next year, it was the first in Julie Green’s decades-long art project, ‘The Last Supper,’ which documented the final meals of death row prisoners around the country.
To Professor Green, who taught art at Oregon State University, their choices put a human face on an inhumane practice. Some requests were elaborate: fried sac-a-lait fish (otherwise known as white perch or crappie, it’s the state fish of Louisiana) topped with crawfish étouffée. And some were starkly mundane: two peanut butter cups and a Dr Pepper.
She planned to paint the meals until capital punishment was abolished, or until she had made 1,000 plates, whichever came first. In September, she painted her 1,000th plate, an oval platter with a single familiar image: the bottle of Coca-Cola requested by a Texas man in 1997.
She ended her life a few weeks later, on Oct. 12, at her home in Corvallis, Ore., in the care of a physician, by physician-assisted suicide, which is permitted under Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act. She was 60. Her husband, the artist Clay Lohmann, said she had ovarian cancer.”
Additional reading:
Smithsonian Magazine, October 27, 2021: Remembering Julie Green, Who Painted the Last Meals of Death Row Inmates
Bellevue Arts Museum: Julie Green: The Last Supper
