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." Heffernan’s graphic memoir, Babe in the Woods (Algonquin Press), was published 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 they admire.
Since 1999, Heffernan has had more than 50 solo exhibitions at museums and other venues across the US and abroad. Her work belongs to 25 museum and institutional collections, and she is represented by Hirschl & Adler Modern in New York and Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Inspired by four decades of telling stories in paint, Heffernan published a graphic memoir, “Babe in the Woods, or the Art of Getting Lost,” (Algonquin Press) in 2024. It is an odyssey story—a woman gets lost in the woods with her infant son—and finds herself on a journey through her tangled past. Eventually she finds her way, with the guidance of powerful art as well as her memories of and associations with intrepid, inspiring women. What distinguishes her odyssey is the rich imagery that mingles 19th-century engravings, Renaissance masterworks and Catholic school kitsch with reproductions of her own drawings and paintings.
The graphic novel expands the storytelling lessons Heffernan has acquiredover years of reading paintings to uncover what she calls their “secrets,” stemming from an essay by Frank Kermode entitled “Secrets and Narrativity.” In his essay, Kermode addresses what he calls “key words” in novels that take the reader to a deeper level of understanding events in the novel. In the case of great paintings secrets exist as well, Heffernan argues, not necessarily in their overt content but in their compositions and the particularized imagery within those compositions that take the viewer deeper into the painting’s meaning. The graphic novel form gave the artist a way to analyze such paintings, ones that she calls “images of wisdom,” unpacking what constitutes a display of “wisdom” in the depicted events and composition of a painting.
More about the artist:
Heffernan received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from University of California at Santa Cruz and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Yale School of Art and Architecture.
In 2011, Heffernan was inducted into the National Academy of Design in New York and is on the Board of Governors. Her numerous awards include two NYFA Fellowships, a 2017 Fellowship at the BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship at MacDowell, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fulbright-Hayes grant to Berlin. 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.
Learn more at www.julieheffernan.net.
