When the Water Rises is on view at the LSU Museum of Art, at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, now through September 17, 2017. 

Julie 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, the LSU School of Art and the LSU Museum of Art. Heffernan is a visiting lecturer for the School of Art. This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue 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.

The exhibition catalog is available from the LSU Museum of Art Store, call 225-389-7210 for shipping information.

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