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Artist Julie Speed (b.1951) can’t remember a time when she wasn't drawing, painting, and assembling things. Early on she had a varied career of odd day jobs like horse trainer, shingle mill worker, house painter, and waitress, but since 1978 she has devoted herself full time to making wildly inventive, often haunting art.

Speed is known for her exquisitely rendered, psychologically open-ended images of figures such as ambivalent clerics, men who might be military leaders or perhaps bellboys, and women, at times pensive, at others, intensely determined. In classic Surrealist tradition, she creates dislocated or de-contextualized arenas where simple objects and colors acquire an elusive, enigmatic significance. Her panel works are painted in a technique drawn from northern Renaissance art and portray imaginary worlds where spectators are compelled to confront their own desires and demons in images called "glimpse pictures."  Speed uses color and its art historical resonance to make skillful commentary on the subjects she portrays. Hues such as scarlet red and royal blue, colors associated with the depictions of religious figures or the nobility in Europe, are given new meaning when reinterpreted through Speed's irony and double-edged humor.

Speeds’ work has appeared in numerous exhibitions across the United States since the 1980s. Julie Speed: The Other Hand is a follow-up to her first solo survey, Queen of My Room: A Survey of the Work by Julie Speed, 1989-1999. The Other Hand features approximately 40 works created from 2003 to the present and is accompanied by the catalog Julie Speed: Paintings, Constructions, and Works on Paper, Volume II (The University of Texas Press, forthcoming, 2009).