15 Facts About Valerie Hegarty

Valerie Hegarty was born on 1967 and is an American painter, sculptor, and installation artist.

Valerie Hegarty 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.

Valerie Hegarty has exhibited at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Artists Space.

Valerie Hegarty has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, among others.

Valerie Hegarty's 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.

Valerie Hegarty is based between New York City and Sullivan County, New York.

Valerie Hegarty received a BA in studio art from Middlebury College in 1989 and a BFA in illustration from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco in 1995, before undertaking graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Valerie Hegarty has described the combined process as "reverse archaeology," and it mirrors her interest in the mutative energy of growth, decay and regeneration.

Valerie Hegarty's process involves careful attention to the material effects of destructive forces, producing surprising juxtapositions: weathered, damaged and aging environments integrated into pristine gallery spaces; violent forces unleashed into opulent period rooms; romantic landscapes come to life with sprouting leaves and branches.

In other exhibitions in the 2010s, Valerie Hegarty produced works that were more self-contained, physically and thematically.

Valerie Hegarty's watermelons are the stuff of colonialism, racist stereotyping, US avarice, and gluttony.

In 2021, Valerie Hegarty took a similar approach in an installation in Riverside Park, Fresh Start, which offered a large, decaying vanitas still-life painting of flowers leaning against a wall behind the bars of an Amtrak maintenance site, which burst with a three-dimensional tangle of roots, leaves and blossoms spilling onto the floor.

Valerie Hegarty has received awards from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Bronx Museum of Art, and Illinois Arts Council, among others.

Valerie Hegarty has been awarded residencies by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MacDowell Colony, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Smack Mellon, and Yaddo, among others.

Valerie Hegarty's 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, New Britain Museum of American Art, Peabody Essex Museum, Perez Art Museum, Portland Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Saatchi Collection, Tang Museum, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, among others.