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Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone Catalogue


Available May 20th 2007
$60 (member price: $54)

Essays by Elizabeth Armstrong, Johanna Burton, and Dave Hickey

A pioneer of infusing abstract painting with elements from popular culture and craft traditions, Mary Heilmann (b. 1940) is one of the preeminent abstract painters of her generation. Her deceptively simple, even offhand approach to painting—at once asserting ease, complexity, and boundless potentiality—now permeates contemporary abstraction, testifying to her broad influence. A San Francisco native who was part of the early development of conceptual and minimal art in New York, Heilmann committed herself to painting in the early 1970s.

This volume presents the first comprehensive overview of Heilmann’s career. Essays by curator Elizabeth Armstrong, art historian Johanna Burton, and critic Dave Hickey explore her painting since 1972 as well as key earlier works and their relationship to her interests in ceramics, decorative arts, film, and music. Accompanying the first traveling retrospective exhibition of Heilmann’s work, this timely and essential volume also details her impact on successive generations of artists and her substantial role in the revitalization of abstraction by a new generation of painters.

Elizabeth Armstrong, organizer of the exhibition that this volume accompanies, is deputy director for programs and chief curator, Orange County Museum of Art. Her recent exhibitions include Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture in the 1950s (2007), Villa America: American Moderns, 1900-1950 (2005), and Girls Night Out (2003).

Johanna Burton is completing a Ph.D. in Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology, where she is writing her dissertation on appropriation in American art of the 1980s. She is on the faculty of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Studies at Bard College and the editor of Cindy Sherman (MIT Press, 2006).

Dave Hickey, a freelance writer of fiction and cultural criticism, teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A former executive editor of Art in America magazine and contributing editor of the Village Voice, he has published two collections of his critical essays on art: The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Art Issues Press, 1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Art Issues Press, 1998).


Published by
Orange County Museum of Art



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