Valerie Hegarty

Valerie Hegarty is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates paintings, sculptures, and installations that often address themes of memory, place, and history. Her site-specific 2012 exhibition Alternative Histories, in which Hegarty “activated” the period rooms at the Brooklyn Museum, exemplifies her work. In an article on the show by Benjamin Sutton for Blouin Artinfo, the artist explained, “This is really setting a movie scene, the way you have to think about the framing in here, like framing a painting. I wanted it to be really painterly against all this formal stuff.” The exhibition’s curator, Eugenie Tsai, elaborated: “One of our great concerns is manifest destiny, so she’s referring to colonization, and the way that nature was destroyed through the building of towns, the settling of the land, and the displacement of indigenous people. And so in some ways she is showing revenge. I think it’s more a reference to nature displaced, and natural forces displaced.”

For Tuesday Evenings at the Modern, Valerie Hegarty shares her work and experiences in “Valerie Hegarty: Reverse Archeology, the Creation of Decay and Other Uncanny Transformations.”
A video recording of this lectures will be available on the Modern's Youtube