School of Art Welcomes Artist and Educator Helen O'Leary to Campus

Eva O'Leary

The School of Art lecture series at the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences welcomes artist and educator Helen O'Leary to campus.

O'Leary grew up in County Wexford, Ireland, and studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin before coming to the United States to continue her studies at the School of Art Institute of Chicago and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is an artist and a professor of art at Penn State School of Visual Arts.

The lecture is at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 21, in Hillside Auditorium.

O'Leary works from memoir, stories of growing up on a farm in Wexford and her life now in the states. She has shared that her childhood was defined by the "if you can't make it, you can't have it" Ireland, a place where making things and making do were central to both the physical and emotional survival of the family.

Her work is rooted in the personal, her own story and the history of storytelling. The work also reflects interest in the relationship between language and literature and art.

"Throughout my career, I have been constructing a very personal and idiomatic formal language based in simple materials and unglamorous gestures, a framework which functions as a kind of syntactical grid of shifting equivalences," said O'Leary.

Helen O'Leary has participated in group exhibitions around the world, including the National Gallery of Art in Limerick, Ireland; the Glasgow Museum of Art in Scotland; the Scott Pfaffman Gallery in New York City; the Galerie le Petit Port in Leiden, The Netherlands; the Contemporary Arts Centre in Sydney, Australia; and in Shanghai, China. 

The Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago; the Michael Gold Gallery in New York City; the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia; The Beverly Art Centre in Chicago; the Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi, India; the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, and the Catherine Hammond Gallery in Cork, Ireland, are among the many venues that have mounted solo exhibitions of her work.

Her art has been honored with two Pollock-Krasner awards and a Joan Mitchell Award for painting and sculpture; several grants from the Arts Council of Ireland; residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Monaghan, Ireland, and the Fundacion Valparaiso in Almeria, Spain; and most recently both the Culturel Irlandaise and Guggenheim fellowships. 

All are invited to learn more about Helen O'Leary's story, work and experience this Thursday, November 21 at the Hillside Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.