Julie Heffernan Featured in Exhibition at Hirschl & Adler Modern

Professor Julie Heffernan is among the artists featured in Women’s Work: Beyond Craft and Convention, a new exhibition at Hirschl & Adler Modern that brings together works by women artists spanning more than 150 years of art history. On view from January 8 through February 6, 2026, the exhibition places Heffernan’s work in dialogue with artists including Mary Cassatt, Elizabeth Catlett, Joan Snyder, Angela Fraleigh, and Elizabeth Turk.

Heffernan paints large-scale narrative paintings that deal with issues like environmental degradation, climate change, and evolving notions of the self. Forty years ago, she started using a process in her work called image streaming that gave her a way to use some of that vast wealth of mental imagery within a mind to tell non-linear visual stories. Image streaming in combination with research opened up a way of painting that allows her to evolve a complex story as she paints. Using the materiality of paint itself, those stories can be embodied in form and tell us a deeper story, that engages complex issues using visual means.