UNIVERSITY PARK, PA.- The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State announced the opening of When the Water Rises: Recent Paintings by Julie Heffernan.

Contemporary artist Julie Heffernan’s paintings explore imaginative scenarios and alternative habitats as her personal response to the threat of environmental disasters. In the wake of recent calamities like Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, Heffernan imagines fantastical worlds in trees or on rafts as waters rise across the globe. Topical references to ISIS, Syrian refugees, and the debate surrounding climate change emerge in the eleven monumental canvases featured in the exhibition. Figures in the works that create, tend, and nurture suggest that humans can adapt to a changing environment even as they allude to environmental systems on the verge of collapse.

“Julie's work addresses excess and its relationship to climate change, issues that become more relevant, more pressing, each day,” said Courtney Taylor, the curator of the exhibition and curator at LSU Museum of Art and the Shaw Center for the Arts. “The beauty of her paintings pulls us in to consider these fraught issues in addition to considering these catastrophes and our complicity, we're pushed to consider our response.” Heffernan’s paintings, she said, suggest a response that can be more creative, empathetic, and in sync with the larger picture and the environment.

Palmer curator Joyce Robinson agrees. “Heffernan is a remarkable painter. Her intricately detailed paintings evoke both the frightening allegories of Hieronymus Bosch and the sublime vistas of Thomas Cole or Albert Bierstadt.”

“We are delighted to host this exhibition of a major figure in the contemporary art world,” said Erin Coe, director of the Palmer Museum of Art. “We encourage our community and visitors to the region this summer to take advantage of this opportunity to view these provocative works.”

Julie Heffernan received her M.F.A. in Painting from Yale University and a B.F.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work is represented in major museum collections including the Brooklyn Museum, McNay Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Palmer Museum of Art. A former professor of painting at Penn State, Heffernan resides in Brooklyn and is a professor of fine arts at Montclair State University. She is represented by P.P.O.W in New York and Catharine Clark in San Francisco.

When the Water Rises was organized by the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, which is available for purchase in the Palmer Museum Store.