Julie Green, whose paintings immortalized prisoners’ last meals, dies at 60 (2024)

But the request that attracted painter and art professor Julie Green’s attention, making them think about the final meals of death row prisoners for the first time, was a more elaborate dinner sought by Malcolm Rent Johnson, 41, who was convicted of the rape and murder of an elderly woman in Oklahoma City.

Opening an Oklahoma newspaper one morning in 2000, Professor Green read an article about Johnson’s execution, detailing his final moments and last meal. The Associated Press reported that he had requested “three fried chicken thighs, 10 or 15 shrimp, tater tots with ketchup, two slices of pecan pie, strawberry ice cream, honey and biscuits and a co*ke.”

Those details “humanized death row for me,” said Professor Green, who taught at the University of Oklahoma at the time and used gender-neutral pronouns. They began collecting stories about executions, nearly all of which noted the condemned’s final meal, and started immortalizing those meals in an art project, “The Last Supper.”

Drawing on news reports, archival research and occasional calls to prison wardens, Professor Green painted images of the meals in cobalt blue on white ceramic plates, noting the date of the execution and the state where it occurred. The plates were kiln-fired to 1,400 degrees and exhibited around the country, with 800 pieces now on display at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington state.

“My long-term hopes for the project are that we stop having capital punishment and that I stop painting plates,” said Professor Green, who vowed to continue until the death penalty was abolished. They revised that plan after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, announcing last month that the project had ended after 21 years and 1,000 plates.

Professor Green, a wide-ranging artist whose paintings also examined gender roles, wrongful conviction, animal abuse and their own colorful life — from a childhood in Japan to a teaching post in Oregon — was 60 when they died Oct. 12 at their home in Corvallis, Ore. Their brother, Scott Green, said that Professor Green died by medically assisted suicide under Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act.

In an email, Professor Green’s mentor Roger Shimomura, an artist and retired professor at the University of Kansas, said that Professor Green’s “work was benevolent without taking a step backward, yet unyielding and powerful in its vision. Once you have seen and absorbed [their] work, you never saw your own world the same.”

Professor Green taught at Oregon State University in Corvallis for the past two decades, and spent six months a year working on stand-alone artworks and projects such as “Fashion Plate,” a series of fashion-focused pieces made on Chinet-brand paper plates, using materials including metal leaf and glow-in-the-dark paint.

The rest of their studio time was devoted to “The Last Supper,” which spurred debate over capital punishment, highlighted a long-standing tradition in U.S. prison systems and seemed to suggest that a person’s final meal could serve as a window into their life. Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the use of the death penalty, 1,536 men and women have been executed in the United States, including 17 in 2020.

Professor Green started the project as a series of sketches and small paintings. But they had long urged their students to match a work’s content to its medium, and decided to try embroidering images of final meals onto napkins. After realizing that “it takes a really long time to embroider a pile of french fries,” they turned to painting plates, and took a china-painting class to refine their technique.

The medium seemed perfectly suited to the project, although Professor Green said they struggled at times with the subject matter, and with the fraught experience of painting food that represented a person’s last moments rather than nourishment, joy or community. “Nothing is harder to paint than blue macaroni and cheese,” they wrote in an artist statement. “Nothing is more pleasant to paint than an apple. Is it wrong to enjoy the act of painting a final meal?”

Acquiring white ceramic plates from secondhand shops, Professor Green tried to match the dishware with the meal whenever they could. A prisoner who requested German ravioli and chicken dumplings got a nice gold-edged plate; when Professor Green learned that the meal had been prepared by the prison’s dietary staff as well as the inmate’s mother, they added the word “mother” to the painting.

One plate showed a birthday cake and pizza, with a quote from the prison staff: “He never had a birthday cake so we ordered a birthday cake for him.” Another, referring to a 1917 execution in Montana, noted that the condemned man “had a bad taste in his mouth and ate an apple.” For inmates who were not offered a special last meal — including prisoners in Texas, which has executed more incarcerated people than any other state since 1976 and stopped offering special meals in 2011 — Professor Green painted a standard prison cafeteria meal and the words “No choice.”

Beginning in 2018, Professor Green also worked on a new series, “First Meal,” in which they illustrated the first meals of people who had been freed after wrongful convictions. The project started after the release of Kristine Bunch, a client of Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Conviction, who had been convicted of murder and arson in connection with the death of her 3-year-old son. Exonerated after 17 years in prison, she dined on scallops, cheese grits, hummus, vegetables and champagne.

“Much of my work is about time and the passage of time,” Professor Green told Rolling Stone in 2019. “Twenty years spent on ‘The Last Supper,’ inmates’ time in prison, time for a last meal, time to be released. ‘First Meal’ paintings are full of pathos and are a slow go in the studio. But a month spent on a relatively simple painting is a short time when one considers years spent in a wrongful conviction.”

Julie Lynn Green was born on Sept. 22, 1961, in Yokosuka, Japan, where their father was stationed in the Navy. He later worked as a chemist, and the family moved frequently before settling in Des Moines. Their mother was an insurance underwriter who also quilted, sewed and made dolls, and encouraged Professor Green’s interest in painting.

Professor Green studied illustration and design at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where they received a bachelor’s degree in 1983. They moved to New York City and worked as a designer for Time Life, and around that same time collided with “a jaywalking elder,” as they told it, while cycling home. They were sued for more than $1 million.

Recounting the experience in an online lecture for Portland State University this year, Professor Green said that they represented themselves in court, learning about the law and “the flaws in our legal system.” The case was tossed out after seven years and shaped some of their later work. “It’s interesting how traumatic experiences can sometimes feed into positive ones,” they said.

Professor Green taught English in Japan before deciding to focus on painting, doing many of their early works in egg tempera, a fast-drying medium that was largely abandoned after the Renaissance. They married one of their first art teachers, Clay Lohmann, in 1995, and received a master’s degree in painting from the University of Kansas the next year.

In addition to their husband, of Corvallis, and their brother, survivors include their mother, Jane Green of Des Moines. “My mom and full family used to support capital punishment and, because of the ‘Last Supper’ project, my mother no longer supports capital punishment,” Professor Green told Rolling Stone. “And I like to say, if you can change your mom, you can change the world.”