Valerie Hegarty (born 1967) is an American painter, sculptor, and installation artist.Sholis, Brian "Valerie Hegarty," ''Artforum'', March 2005. Retrieved August 13, 2022.Hall, Emily "Valerie Hegarty," ''Artforum'', December 2006. Retrieved August 13, 2022. She is known for irreverent, often critical works that replicate canonical paintings, furnishings, and architectural spaces from American or personal history undergoing various processes of transformation.Barliant, Claire "Valerie Hegarty," ''Art in America'', September 2010. Retrieved August 16, 2022.Reisenfeld, Robin. "Valerie Hegarty," ''Sculpture'', December 2010.Johnson, Ken ''The New York Times'', March 25, 2010. Retrieved August 13, 2022. Hegarty most often portrays her recreations in meticulously realized, '' trompe l’oeil'' states of decay, ruin, or physical attack related to their circumstances (e.g., a seascape pierced by harpoons, a still life of food being eaten by crows).Steinhauer, Jillian "Valerie Hegarty," ''The New York Times'', December 19, 2018. Retrieved August 13, 2022.Rossetti, Halo "Valerie Hegarty," ''Artforum'', April 2012. Retrieved August 13, 2022.Davis, Ben "The Armory Bowl," ''Artnet'', March 10, 2006. Retrieved August 16, 2022. Her work examines American historical themes involving colonization, slavery,
Manifest Destiny
Manifest destiny was a cultural belief in the 19th century in the United States, 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand across North America.
There were three basic tenets to the concept:
* The special vir ...
, nationalism, art-historical movements and their ideological tenets,
romantic
Romantic may refer to:
Genres and eras
* The Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement of the 18th and 19th centuries
** Romantic music, of that era
** Romantic poetry, of that era
** Romanticism in science, of that e ...
conceptions of nature, and environmental degradation.Harrington-Johnson, Heidi "Valerie Hegarty at Burning in Water," ''Artforum'', October 2016. Retrieved August 13, 2022.Desmarais, Charles "Optimism is opening an art gallery, and its name is Burning in Water," ''San Francisco Chronicle'', April 27, 2018. Retrieved August 18, 2022.Mendelson, Meredith. "Paper Pushers," ''ARTnews'', May 2007, p. 150. ''Sculpture'' critic Robin Reisenfeld wrote that among other things, Hegarty's art is "informed by 19th-century American landscape painting as an expression of the sublime, as well as by the manufacturing of two-dimensional 'masterworks' to be destroyed in three-dimensional fashion in order to evoke entropic forces of growth and decay."
Hegarty has exhibited at venues including the
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...
Artists Space
Artists Space is a non-profit art gallery and arts organization first established at 155 Wooster Street in Soho, New York City. Founded in 1972 by Irving Sandler and Trudie Grace and funded by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Artist ...
Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation was established in 1976. It is an American nonprofit organization that provides funding for the arts.
History
The Gottlieb Foundation was established after Adolph Gottlieb’s death in 1974. Esther Gottlie ...
Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation
The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation was founded in 1918 by Louis Comfort Tiffany to operate his estate, Laurelton Hall, in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. It was designed to be a summer retreat for artists and craftspeople. In 1946 the estate cl ...
,Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Valerie Hegarty Award Winners. Retrieved August 16, 2022. among others. Her work belongs to institutional collections including the
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...
Hood Museum of Art
The Hood Museum of Art is owned and operated by Dartmouth College, located in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the United States. The first reference to the development of an art collection at Dartmouth dates to 1772, making the collection among the ol ...
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
The Wadsworth Atheneum is an art museum in Hartford, Connecticut. The Wadsworth is noted for its collections of European Baroque art, ancient Egyptian and Classical bronzes, French and American Impressionist paintings, Hudson River School lands ...
.Malin Gallery. ''Valerie Hegarty: Gone Viral'', New York: Malin Gallery, 2021. She is based between New York City and Sullivan County, New York.
Education and early career
Hegarty was born in 1967 in
Burlington, Vermont
Burlington is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Vermont and the seat of Chittenden County. It is located south of the Canada–United States border and south of Montreal. As of the 2020 U.S. census, the population was 44,743. It ...
. She received a BA in studio art from
Middlebury College
Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college in Middlebury, Vermont. Founded in 1800 by Congregationalists, Middlebury was the first operating college or university in Vermont. The college currently enrolls 2,858 undergraduates from all ...
in 1989 and a BFA in illustration from the
Academy of Art College
The Academy of Art University (AAU or ART U), formerly Academy of Art College and Richard Stephens Academy of Art, is a private for-profit art school in San Francisco, California. It was founded as the Academy of Advertising Art by Richard S. ...
in San Francisco in 1995, before undertaking graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 2002).Smack Mellon Valerie Hegarty Studio Artists. Retrieved August 16, 2022. After graduating, she exhibited in group shows at the
Bronx Museum of Art
The Bronx Museum of the Arts (BxMA), also called the Bronx Museum of Art or simply the Bronx Museum, is an American cultural institution located in Concourse, Bronx, New York. The museum focuses on contemporary and 20th-century works created by A ...
Drawing Center
The Drawing Center is a Manhattan, New York, museum and a nonprofit exhibition space that focuses on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary.
History
The Drawing Center was founded by former assistant curator of drawings at ...
,Falkenstein, Michelle. "Never Mind About Pencils," ''ARTnews'', November 2004.
Smack Mellon
Smack Mellon is a non-profit arts organization located at 92 Plymouth Street, in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Smack Mellon supports emerging, under-recognized mid-career, and women artists through a highly regarded exhibition program, competitive studio re ...
, MoMA PS1,
White Columns
White Columns is New York City’s oldest alternative non-profit art space. White Columns is known as a showcase for up-and-coming artists, and is primarily devoted to emerging artists who are not affiliated with galleries. All work submitted is ...
Kimmelman, Michael "Inspiration from Real Estate Rejects," ''The New York Times'', September 9, 2005. Retrieved August 16, 2022. and Artists Space, and solo exhibitions at MCA Chicago (2003) and Guild & Greyshkul (2005, 2006), among others. Her later solo exhibitions have taken place at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery,Meier, Allison. "Three LES Shows Reveal a World of Hidden Details," ''Hyperallergic'', September 20, 2012.
Marlborough Chelsea
Marlborough Fine Art was founded in London in 1946 by Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer. In 1963, a gallery was opened as Marlborough-Gerson in Manhattan, New York, at the Fuller Building on Madison Avenue and 57th Street, which later relocated ...
and Malin Gallery in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, Burning in Water (New York and San Francisco), and Locust Projects (Miami),Sharkey, Alix. "Miami’s Big Art Experiment," ''Plum Miami'', May 2011. among others.
Hegarty is also a writer—her story "Cats vs. Cancer" was published in the ''New England Review'' in 2019 and won a PEN America Dau Prize in 2020 for short story debut.''Catapult'' "A Conversation With Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Author Valerie Hegarty," September 14, 2020. Retrieved August 22, 2022.Hegarty, Valerie "Cats vs. Cancer," ''New England Review'', Vol. 40, No. 1, 2019. Retrieved August 22, 2022.
Work and reception
Hegarty's best-known works are painting-sculptures and installations that employ ''trompe l’oeil'' construction—often layering paper, cardboard, cloth, papier-mâché and paint on objects, walls and floors—which she then peels, degrades or attacks through various means. She has described the combined process as "reverse archaeology," and it mirrors her interest in the mutative energy of growth, decay and regeneration.Schwendener, Marta. "Crowdsourced Exhibition Looks Kind of Familiar," ''The New York Times'', January 2, 2013. Her process involves careful attention to the material effects of destructive forces (rot, overgrown nature, fire, dilapidation), producing surprising juxtapositions: weathered, damaged and aging environments integrated into pristine gallery spaces; violent forces unleashed into opulent period rooms; romantic landscapes come to life with sprouting leaves and branches.Bedard, Matthew. "Valerie Hegarty: Nature’s Methodic and Unpredictable Fury," ''Flaunt Magazine'', August 2009.
Early installations
Hegarty's early work explored architecture, artifice, ephemerality and memory, often by resurrecting physical environments of the past through a process of layering illusionistic imagery on paper and then peeling it to expose strata—as in an archeological diagram—evoking senses of nostalgia, displacement, mortality, or emergent repressed forces.Gitlen, Laurel. "Use and Abuse, Art and Aftermath," ''Hotel Lobby, West Loop'', Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago, 2002. Two works created in Chicago—''Hotel Lobby, West Loop'' ( Gallery 400, 2002) and ''Green Bathroom'' (MCA Chicago, 2003)—partially transformed gallery spaces, respectively, into an aging downtown hotel and a recreation of her studio bathroom in a future state of neglect. For "Play Pen" (Drawing Center, 2004), she created a to-scale rendition of the perimeter of her childhood bedroom that over the course of the exhibition she peeled away, revealing layers of yellow, periwinkle blue and bubblegum pink representing iterations of the room’s décor.
In the subsequent works, ''Rosebush (for Gordon Matta Clark)'' (White Columns, 2005) and ''Landscaping: PS1 Greater New York'' (MoMA PS1, 2005), Hegarty created tableaux of nature erupting out of exhibition spaces.Princenthal, Nancy. "Reinvesting in Fake Estates," ''Art in America'', January 2006. Her New York solo-exhibition debut, "Landscaping" (Guild & Greyshkul, 2005), featured three works collapsing exterior and interior views, including a woodland idyll of leaves, branches and a decrepit log cabin emerging from the gallery’s white walls; ''Artforums Brian Sholis deemed it an escapist work that "partly literalized the environmentalist fantasy of nature triumphantly overpowering the built realm," while demonstrating "that every site has its history."
Later work
In the mid-2000s, Hegarty began creating irreverent painting-sculptures that replicated renowned still-lifes, landscapes and portraits (e.g., by Albert Bierstadt,
Frederic Edwin Church
Frederic Edwin Church (May 4, 1826 – April 7, 1900) was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, ...
and
Gilbert Stuart
Gilbert Charles Stuart ( Stewart; December 3, 1755 – July 9, 1828) was an American painter from Rhode Island Colony who is widely considered one of America's foremost portraitists. His best-known work is an unfinished portrait of George Washi ...
) only to destroy them through detailed simulations of decay and various assaults.Smith, Roberta "In These Shows, the Material is the Message," ''The New York Times'', August 10, 2007. Retrieved August 13, 2022. Critics suggested that these works "gently ribbed art historical precedents" such as 19th-century expressions of the sublime and challenged both romantic attachments to Americana and the legacy of the nation's "whitewashed history."Laster, Paul. "Valerie Hegarty: Altered States," ''Time Out New York'', May 3–9, 2012. Reviews described the paper assemblage ''Still Lives with Crows'' (2006)—a tableau of crows tearing bloody hunks of meat out of a still life depicting a steak and vegetables—as "a picture of image culture cannibalizing itself," conveying amusement and a "
Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (; Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widel ...
-like eeriness."Baron, Reuben M. and Joan Boykoff Baron. "The 2006 New York Armory Show," ''Artcritical'', June 2006.
In her solo exhibitions "Seascape" (2006), "View From Thanatopsis" (2007) and "Altered States" (2012), Hegarty took over gallery spaces "in
kudzu
Kudzu (; also called Japanese arrowroot or Chinese arrowroot) is a group of climbing, coiling, and trailing deciduous perennial vines native to much of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and some Pacific islands, but invasive species, invasive in many ...
-like fashion," with simulations of shipwrecked and decimated paintings and Colonial furniture, sculptural debris and rot, and plants emerging from fissures in walls and floors.Sumpter, Helen. "Valerie Hegarty," ''Time Out London'', April 23, 2007.Viveros-Faune, Christian. "Valerie Hegarty: Ruin Me," ''The Village Voice'', April 18, 2012. "Seascape's" centerpiece was ''Overseas (Fireplace with Harpoons)'', a recreated Federalist-era fireplace, stuck full of harpoons and spattered with simulated tar, slime, mold, and seagull droppings that emanated from a harpoon wound in a reworking of the Church landscape ''
The Icebergs
''The Icebergs'' is an 1861 oil painting by the American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church. It was inspired by his 1859 voyage to the North Atlantic around Newfoundland and Labrador. Considered one of Church's "Great Pictures"—measuring ...
'' (1861) hung over the mantel. ''Artforums Emily Hall wrote that the show portrayed the ocean as an "enormous engine of decay"—a retort to "artists who have sought to frame nature as something over which man has prevailed with moral authority" and to over-estimations of the timelessness of America's colonial values. "View From Thanatopsis" included walls peppered with bullet holes, an armoire eaten to bits, a painting of the Grand Canyon split by a crack tearing through wall and floor, and a burnt, battered and doubled-over replication of Church's 1857 painting, ''
Niagara
Niagara may refer to:
Geography Niagara Falls and nearby places In both the United States and Canada
*Niagara Falls, the famous waterfalls in the Niagara River
*Niagara River, part of the U.S.–Canada border
*Niagara Escarpment, the cliff ov ...
''.
Critics described the "Altered States" exhibition as a faux-Colonial ''
memento mori
''Memento mori'' (Latin for 'remember that you ave todie'''The New Yorker'' "Valerie Hegarty," April 28, 2012. Retrieved August 16, 2022. Its individual works included: the sandy, emaciated ''Shipwrecked Armoire with Barnacles''; ''Headless George Washington with Table ( Lansdowne Portrait)'', a horrific reimagining of the Stuart portrait, torn asunder and scorched, with its partially melted head sliding onto the gallery floor like a shriveled mask; and ''Rug with Grass'', a shredded, rotted Empire style carpet sprouting reeds and aquatic plants that indicated the potential of growth out of decay. Hegarty's exhibition "Alternative Histories," (Brooklyn Museum, 2013) explored similar themes—colonization, Manifest Destiny, repressed history, mortality—with sculptural interventions in the museum's decorated, period rooms that included a flock of attacking crows, dissolving portraits, '' vanitas''-influenced still lifes and rugs overgrown with vegetation.Miller, Leigh Ann. "The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won’t Want to Miss," ''Art in America'', July 25, 2013.Brooklyn Museum "Valerie Hegarty: Alternative Histories," Exhibitions. Retrieved August 18, 2022.
In other exhibitions in the 2010s, Hegarty produced works that were more self-contained, physically and thematically. "Cosmic Collisions" (2010) featured discrete wall reliefs and freestanding sculptures—largely riffing on mid-century
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...
and
minimalism
In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...
—that were seemingly warped, battered and otherwise altered by astral or earthbound cataclysms.Schwendener, Martha. "Valerie Hegarty," ''The New Yorker'', March 22, 2010. Critics suggested works such as ''Starry Rothko'' (2010)—a charred, crumpled barely stable canvas altered by apparent space travel—addressed and spoofed solemn notions of cosmic evolution and modernist transcendence, genius and purity.
The exhibitions "Figure, Flowers, Fruit," (2012) and "American Berserk" (2016) focused on themes of organic decay, growth and excess. The former show featured four canvases—three still lifes and a portrait—sprouting chaotic tangles of flowers and roots (e.g., ''Flower Frenzy'') or forms exploding and protruding from fruit, such as the tongue-like appendage emerging from a painted wedge in ''Watermelon Tongue''. In "American Berserk," Hegarty introduced surreal, anthropomorphic ceramic sculptures: rotting, wounded, seemingly smiling watermelon wedges resting on a plinth whose pink flesh resembled gums and growing teeth, tongues and ribs; "edibles-as-people" portraits (e.g., ''Fruit Face'', 2015); and lumpy topiary busts of George Washington. ''Artforum'' stated, "Hegarty is drawn to this country’s damaged history, its warped psyche. Her watermelons are the stuff of colonialism, racist stereotyping, US avarice, and gluttony. Her fruits aren’t juicy, they’re bleeding—a lacerated bounty … reinforcing our sense of distance between the idealism of the American past and its sad, corrosive present."
''The New York Times'' described the exhibition "Bloom & Gloom" (2018) as a "dark show" whose illusionistic reliefs, sculptures and wall works found beauty and wonder amid an intimate, dystopian vision of cracked, peeled, crumbling or rotting walls (e.g., ''Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum (My Subway Stop)''; ''Boarded Up Window, Brooklyn'') and dying flowers. In 2021, Hegarty took a similar approach in an installation in Riverside Park, ''Fresh Start'', which offered a large, decaying ''vanitas'' still-life painting of flowers leaning against a wall behind the bars of an Amtrak maintenance site, which burst with a three-dimensional tangle of roots, leaves and blossoms spilling onto the floor.Sheets, Hilarie M "Art Blooms Alongside Nature in Riverside Park," '' The New York Times'', June 4, 2021. Retrieved August 13, 2022.
Awards and public collections
Hegarty has received awards from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (2022),New York Foundation for the Arts (2009, 2017),''Artforum'' "NYFA Announces 2017 Fellows," News. July 7, 2017. Retrieved August 13, 2022. Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2010, 2016), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (2016), Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2004),Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Alumni Retrieved August 22, 2022. Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (2003), Bronx Museum of Art (2003),Bronx Museum of the Arts Aim Fellowship Retrieved August 16, 2022. and Illinois Arts Council (2002, 2000), among others. She has been awarded residencies by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC),Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Alumni Retrieved August 28, 2022.MacDowell Colony,MacDowell Valerie Hegarty Artists. Retrieved August 16, 2022. Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program,Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program "Artists 1991-2013." Retrieved August 28, 2022.
Smack Mellon
Smack Mellon is a non-profit arts organization located at 92 Plymouth Street, in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Smack Mellon supports emerging, under-recognized mid-career, and women artists through a highly regarded exhibition program, competitive studio re ...
, and Yaddo, among others.Yaddo Visual Artists Artists. Retrieved August 16, 2022.
Her work belongs to the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum,Brooklyn Museum "Valerie Hegarty," Collection. Retrieved August 18, 2022.Boca Raton Museum of Art,
Cahoon Museum of American Art
The Cahoon Museum of American Art is an art museum located in Cotuit, Massachusetts. It features fine art, folk art and American art from the 1800s through the present. Public programs include a series of annual changing exhibitions, tours, artis ...
Hood Museum of Art
The Hood Museum of Art is owned and operated by Dartmouth College, located in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the United States. The first reference to the development of an art collection at Dartmouth dates to 1772, making the collection among the ol ...
Rhode Island School of Design Museum
The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD Museum) is an art museum integrated with the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, US. The museum was co-founded with the school in 1877, and still shares multiple build ...
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
The Wadsworth Atheneum is an art museum in Hartford, Connecticut. The Wadsworth is noted for its collections of European Baroque art, ancient Egyptian and Classical bronzes, French and American Impressionist paintings, Hudson River School lands ...