The Oklahoma City Museum of Art to Show "Julie Heffernan ~ Infinite Work in Progress"

Written by Dianne Morganstern Thursday, 02 February 2012 22:04

Oklahoma City.- The Oklahoma City Museum of Art is pleased to present "Julie Heffernan: Infinite Work in Progress", on view at the museum from February 16th through May 13th. This exhibition, the 5th installment of the "New Frontiers Series for Contemporary Art", will present 20 paintings by artist Julie Heffernan. Spanning a decade of her career, Infinite Work in Progress will provide visitors with an in-depth look at the artist’s work. The "New Frontiers Series for Contemporary Art" presents the work of individual contemporary artists and current perspectives in the field. The series was created to provide a framework for the exchange of ideas between the Mu­seum, artists, and the community and to advance the visual arts. "New Frontiers" connects the Museum to the international dialogue on contemporary art and emphasizes the importance of the art-of-our-time as a critical and dynamic part of our daily lives.

Heffernan’s work explores the intricacies of figurative, still-life, and landscape painting, while systematically layering aspects of historical knowledge into complex compositions. Her paintings appear to hover between the reality of daily existence and forces that spread across time and space. Utilizing a broad spectrum of historical references, Heffernan presents sensual narratives in an ongoing, ever changing, dialogue that describes aspects of our relationship to the planet’s natural forces and to each other. “Julie Heffernan’s work is mesmerizing, thoughtful, and beautifully executed. I think visitors to the exhibition will be astonished by the intensity of her artistic vision,” said Glen Gentele, president & CEO of the Museum. Julie Heffernan (American, b. 1956) received her MFA from the Yale School of Art (CT), and her BFA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Heffernan has been exhibiting widely for the past two decades. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Fulbright-Hayes Grant, National Endowment for the Arts: Individual Fellowship Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts: Individual Artist Grant, among others. Heffernan’s work is included in public and private collections internationally. Selected exhibitions include those at The Korean Biennial (Korea), Weatherspoon Art Museum (NC), Tampa Museum of Art (FL), Knoxville Museum of Art (TN), Columbia Museum of Art (SC), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), the New Museum (NY), the Norton Museum of Art (FL), The American Academy of Arts and Letters (NY), John Michael Kohler Arts Center (WI), The Palmer Museum of Art (PA), National Academy Museum & School (NY), McNay Art Museum (TX), Herter Art Gallery (MA), Mint Museum of Art (NC), and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VA), among numerous others.


Accredited by the American Association of Museums, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art serves over 125,000 visitors annually from all fifty states and over thirty foreign countries and hosts special exhibitions drawn from throughout the world. The Museum’s collection covers a period of five centuries with strengths in American and European art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and includes a comprehensive collection of glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly. The Museum’s collection of American art includes paintings and sculptures by artists from the colonial era through 1960. Highlights include works by Hans Hofmann, Thomas Moran, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Willson Peale. The collection includes twenty-eight works donated by the Works Progress Administration in 1942. This gift formed the core collection of the Oklahoma Art Center, the predecessor of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. The American Art collection includes numerous examples by artists who were active in Oklahoma, such as Oscar Brousse Jacobson, Doel Reed, Nellie Shepherd, and Nan Sheets. Also represented are later examples by artists such as Isabel Bishop, Jack Levine, and Moses Soyer, who came to prominence during the interwar decades. The European art collection contains examples from the Baroque-era through the early twentieth-century. Highlights of the European art collection include English genre painting of the nineteenth-century as well as examples of French post-Impressionistic painting from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Key artists in the European art collection are Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Gustave Courbet, André Derain, Francis Hayman, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Paintings and sculptures created from 1945 to the present include works by Alexander Calder, Don Eddy, Eric Fischl, Ellsworth Kelly, Alfonso Ossorio, and Philip Pearlstein. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.okcmoa.com

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