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Julie Heffernan, Paula G. Manship Endowed Lecture Series
March 15, 2017 @ 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Artist Julie Heffernan will present a Paula G. Manship Endowed Lecture at the LSU College of Art & Design at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 15, 2017, in the LSU Design Building Auditorium (room 103), and the LSU Museum of Art will present the exhibition, When the Water Rises: Recent Paintings by Julie Heffernan, March 11–September 17, 2017.
Heffernan’s work explores mind’s eye imagery to create complex environments. She is represented by PPOW, Catharine Clark in San Francisco, and Mark Moore in Los Angeles. Heffernan is a member of the National Academy. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries, including Hauser and Wirth in London and New York. Heffernan has received numerous grants including an NEA, NYFA, and Fullbright Fellowship and her work is in the permanent collections of major museums, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Heffernan is a professor of fine arts at Montclair State University.
Heffernan’s recent paintings create alternative habitats in response to environmental disaster and planetary excess. With rising waters, she imagines worlds in trees or on rafts in which undulating mattresses, tree boughs, and road signs guide the journey. Construction cones interrupt the landscape signaling places to stop, enter tiny interior worlds, and reflect on the human condition—its feckless activity, violence, failure, and redemption. Heffernan tends these alternative environments to safeguard bounties we cannot live without. In other moments, she names names and points fingers to those people and activities implicated in recent calamities of both the physical and socio-political environment. Intricately wrought, Heffernan’s paintings evoke the fantastical allegory of Hieronymus Bosch and the sublime of Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt.
When the Water Rises is a collaboration between the LSU College of Art & Design and the LSU Museum of Art. Heffernan is a visiting lecturer for the School of Art. This exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with essays by curator Courtney Taylor, art critic and writer Eleanor Heartney, and LSU Professor of Art Kelli Scott Kelley.
Julie Heffernan received her MFA in painting from Yale and a BFA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Heffernan has received numerous grants including an NEA, NYFA, and Fullbright Fellowship and is in the collection of major museums including the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She is represented by P.P.O.W in New York and Catharine Clark in San Francisco. Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University.
The exhibition, organized by the LSU Museum of Art, will travel throughout 2018, including Scarfone/Hartley Gallery at The University of Tampa, Tampa, Florida; Palmer Museum of Art at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, Virginia.
When the Water Rises will be on view at the LSU Museum of Art through September 17, 2017. A gallery talk and reception will be held at the LSU Museum of Art on Thursday, March 16, 2017, 6–8:30 p.m.