Julie Heffernan is an American painter whose artwork has been described by writer Rebecca Solnit as “a new kind of history painting” and by The New Yorker as “ironic rococo surrealism with a social-satirical twist.” She uses the term Self-Portrait to describe what are extremely subjective takes on a world gone awry. While invoking a sense of the possible in these vividly detailed realms, she reflects on environmental, (art) historical, feminist, literary, social, and political subjects.
Heffernan received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from the University of California at Santa Cruz and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Yale School of Art and Architecture. She is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Heffernan’s graphic memoir, Babe in the Woods (Algonguin Press), will be out in 2024. She is the founder and editor of the blog Painters on Paintings, an ongoing conversation between artists focusing on the work of another artist.
In 2011, Heffernan was inducted into the National Academy of Design in New York and is on the Board of Governors. She was granted a 2021 Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts and was a 2017 Fellow of the BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France: a Meridian Scholar Artist-In-Residence Fellow at the University of Tampa and featured artist for the 2017 MacDowell Colony. In 2013, Heffernan was awarded a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship at MacDowell and in 2012, she was invited to be the Lee Ellen Fleming Artist-In-Residence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. In 2010, she was the Commencement Speaker for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and in 2009, she was the featured artist at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, a Fulbright-Hayes grant to Berlin, Heffernan was also a nominee for the “Anonymous Was a Woman” award. Heffernan was commissioned by Adam Jones of Tool to contribute artwork for two custom Gibson guitars. Since 1999, Heffernan has had more than 50 solo exhibitions at museums and other venues across the United States and abroad, most recently at Hirschl & Adler Modern in 2023. Her work is represented in 25 museums and institutional collections.
Catharine Clark Gallery is scheduled to present Heffernan's solo exhibition November 23, 2024 – January 18, 2025. She has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2005.
