When the Water Rises ― Recent Paintings

This exhibition catalogue features recent works by artist Julie Heffernan included in LSU Museum of Art’s exhibition, When the Water Rises. Essays by Curator Courtney Taylor, art writer and critic Eleanor Heartney, and LSU School of Art professor Kelli Scott Kelley as well as a statement by Julie Heffernan accompany the full-color plates in this richly illustrated catalogue.

Julie Heffernan’s recent paintings imagine alternative habitats as creative responses to climate change. With waters rising all over the globe, Heffernan imagines worlds in trees or life on rafts in which undulating mattresses, tree branches, and road signs act as guides for the wayward journey. Construction zones interrupt the landscape, signaling places to stop and enter interior worlds, to reflect on the human condition—its feckless activity, violence, and failure. Heffernan reveals worlds within worlds, where her characters repurpose luxury items and safeguard bounties we cannot live without. Figures tending, nurturing, and creating suggest redemption—that we can adapt to a changed environment. With these paintings, Heffernan spells out the dilemma of climate change, but offers a vision of a creative sublime to carry us forward.

Julie Heffernan received her MFA in Painting from Yale and a BFA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is represented by Catharine Clark in San Francisco and P.P.O.W. in New York. Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University.

Courtney Taylor is the Curator at the LSU Museum of Art. Taylor earned an MA in Museum Studies with a focus on visual culture from the University of Tulsa and BA from Hendrix College in history and art history. Taylor has worked in curatorial departments at the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas; Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville; Philbrook Museum; and Gilcrease Museum.

Eleanor Heartney is a contributing editor at Art in America and has written extensively for publications such as ARTnews, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Brooklyn Rail. She has authored several books on contemporary art including Art and Today; Defending Complexity: Art, Politics, and the New World Order; Postmodernism; Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination and Contemporary Art; and Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads. She co-authored After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art and The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium. Heartney is a recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism.

Kelli Scott Kelley is a professor of painting at Louisiana State University. Kelley received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She authored a book featuring her narrative artwork, entitled Accalia and the Swamp Monster, in 2014. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at museums such as the Ogden Museum of Southern Art; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Kelley’s work is featured in the permanent collections of the LSU Museum of Art, Tyler Museum of Art, and the Eugenia Summer Gallery.