This year's Sterling Lecture will be given by Professor Mary Beth Heffernan.
Professor Mary Beth Heffernan will trace the arc of her research-based art practice, illuminating the questions and material explorations that inform her work.
Mary Beth Heffernan is a visual artist and Professor of Art at Occidental College. Professor Heffernan’s research-based interdisciplinary art is animated by questions of corporeality, representation, social history, ethics, and medicine. Heffernan is the founding creator of the PPE Portrait Project, social practice art addressing the splintering of human connection experienced during the Ebola epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic. Implemented the across the US, Canada, and beyond, Heffernan’s work expands the definition of art as it transforms the practice of medicine.
Professor Heffernan's art is included in numerous public collections, including The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, the Hammer Museum/Grunwald Center Collection, Light Work of Syracuse, NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York City Library, The Royal College of Nursing and the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment. The PPE Portrait Project is currently in a 10 year exhibition entitled Being Human at the Wellcome Collection, the museum of the Wellcome Trust in London.
A reception will follow the lecture on AGC North Patio.
About the Sterling Award
The Graham L. Sterling Memorial Award was established in 1972 to recognize a faculty member with a distinguished record of teaching, service and professional achievement.
