Valerie Hegarty

November 3 — 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.” 

This popular series of lectures and presentations by artists, architects, historians, and critics is free and open to the public each Tuesday from September 15 through November 10. Visit www.themodern.org/programs/lectures for more information on each talk.

Lectures begin at 7 pm in the Museum’s auditorium. Seating begins at 6:30 pm and is limited to 250; a live broadcast of the presentations is shown in Café Modern for any additional guests. Free admission tickets (limit two) are available at the Modern’s information desk beginning at 5 pm on the day of the lecture. The museum galleries remain open until 7 pm on Tuesday evenings during the series (general admission applies).

Café Modern serves cocktails and appetizers on Tuesday nights until 7 pm during the lecture series.

Image credit: Valerie Hegarty, George Washington Melted 2, 2011. Canvas, stretcher, acrylic paint, paper, and gel medium. 16 x 12 x 1 inches