Nothing captured our attention this year quite like Julie Weitz’s enigmatic paintings. On pure white paper, her delicate renditions in gouache of a particularly charged symbol — the hood, in its various iconic forms — sent a little shiver up our spine while arousing admiration for her nearly flawless technique. From the KKK to Abu Ghraib, Weitz’s hoods summoned thoughts of bogeymen, as well as entities with more ambiguous associations, yet somehow managed to be vaguely comical, divorced from their real-life contexts.
