Julie Heffernan (born 1956 in Peoria, Illinois) is an American painter whose work has been described by the writer Rebecca Solnit as "a new kind of history painting" and by The New Yorker as "ironic rococo surrealism with a social-satirical twist." Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Education
She received a B.F.A. at the University of California, Santa Cruz and, in 1985, an M.F.A. in Painting at the Yale School of Art.
Career
Heffernan was raised in Northern California as a Catholic, which influenced the theme of figurative imagery in her works. Her imaginative landscapes feature such elements as exploding cities, castoff gods and garbage, and falling torrents of animals, meteors and gemstones. These elements reflect her view of the world after "calamities" such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP Oil Spill threaten to make it unlivable.
Writing in The New York Sun, art critic David Cohen says of Heffernan's work in a 2007 exhibition: "These paintings are a hybrid of genres and styles, mixing allegory, portraiture, history painting, and still life, while in title they are all presented as self-portraits."
In October 2013, she exhibited eleven paintings in her exhibition Sky is Falling at the P.P.O.W. gallery, New York City.
She is the recipient of many grants and fellowships including a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, a Fulbright-Hayes grant to West Berlin, and several awards from the National Academy Museum.
Heffernan, along with fellow Brooklyn-based artist Virginia Wagner, runs "Painters on Paintings," a blog launched in 2014 for artists to share work that has influenced or inspired them.
Personal life
She is married to Jonathan Kalb, theater critic and professor in the Theater Department at Hunter College. Heffernan is the mother of two sons: Oliver, the elder, and Sam.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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