Valerie Hegarty

Valerie Hegarty, Alternative Histories: The Canes Acres Plantation Dining Room, mixed media, dimensions variable, 2013.

Valerie Hegarty (born 1967) is an American painter, sculptor, and installation artist. She is known for irreverent, often critical works that replicate canonical paintings, furnishings, and architectural spaces from American or personal history undergoing various processes of transformation. Hegarty most often portrays her recreations in meticulously realized, trompe l’oeil states of decay, ruin, or physical attack related to their circumstances (e.g., a seascape pierced by harpoons, a still life of food being eaten by crows). Her work examines American historical themes involving colonization, slavery, Manifest Destiny, nationalism, art-historical movements and their ideological tenets, romantic conceptions of nature, and environmental degradation. Sculpture critic Robin Reisenfeld wrote that among other things, Hegarty's art is "informed by 19th-century American landscape painting as an expression of the sublime, as well as by the manufacturing of two-dimensional 'masterworks' to be destroyed in three-dimensional fashion in order to evoke entropic forces of growth and decay." MoMA PS1, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), and Artists Space. She has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, among others. Her work belongs to institutional collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art, Perez Art Museum, and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. She is based between New York City and Sullivan County, New York.

Education and early career Hegarty was born in 1967 in Burlington, Vermont. After graduating, she exhibited in group shows at the Bronx Museum of Art, Drawing Center, Smack Mellon, , and Artists Space, Marlborough Chelsea among others.

Hegarty is also a writer—her story "Cats vs. Cancer" was published in the New England Review in 2019 and won a PEN America Dau Prize in 2020 for short story debut.

Valerie Hegarty, Childhood Bedroom, painted paper, glue, cardboard and fabric, 9' x 15' x 13', 2004.

Work and reception Hegarty's best-known works are painting-sculptures and installations that employ trompe l’oeil construction—often layering paper, cardboard, cloth, papier-mâché and paint on objects, walls and floors—which she then peels, degrades or attacks through various means. She has described the combined process as "reverse archaeology," and it mirrors her interest in the mutative energy of growth, decay and regeneration. Critics suggested that these works "gently ribbed art historical precedents" Reviews described the paper assemblage Still Lives with Crows (2006)—a tableau of crows tearing bloody hunks of meat out of a still life depicting a steak and vegetables—as "a picture of image culture cannibalizing itself,"

In her solo exhibitions "Seascape" (2006), "View From Thanatopsis" (2007) and "Altered States" (2012), Hegarty took over gallery spaces "in kudzu-like fashion," "Seascape's" centerpiece was Overseas (Fireplace with Harpoons), a recreated Federalist-era fireplace, stuck full of harpoons and spattered with simulated tar, slime, mold, and seagull droppings that emanated from a harpoon wound in a reworking of the Church landscape The Icebergs (1861) hung over the mantel.

Valerie Hegarty, Fresh Start (The Covid Diaries Series), wood, canvas, paper, glue, wire, tape, epoxy clay, dimensions variable, 2021. In other exhibitions in the 2010s, Hegarty produced works that were more self-contained, physically and thematically.

Awards and public collections Hegarty has received awards from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (2022), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2010, 2016), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (2003), and Illinois Arts Council (2002, 2000), among others. MacDowell Colony, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Smack Mellon,

Her work belongs to the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Cahoon Museum of American Art, Hudson River Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Perez Art Museum, Portland Museum of Art,