Art History & Visual Arts

Occidental College

Faculty

  • Mary Beth Heffernan

  • Associate Professor
  • B.F.A., Boston University
  • M.F.A., California Institute of the Arts
  • Whitney Independent Study Program, Studio Program
  • Phone: 323-259-2749
  • E-mail: heffernan@oxy.edu


Mary Beth Heffernan teaches all levels of sculpture, installation, and hybrid studio/theory courses in photography and visual culture. Her art practice reflects this range of interests, incorporating photography, video, installation, sculpture and writing to explore corporeality and its relation to images, words and other representations. “For the past twelve years, she has been fascinated by language’s ability to construct the body and by flesh that resists assimilation into recognizable categories of meaning. As such, Heffernan has explored what it means to be embodied, to negotiate a coherent identity.” Her most recent work, photographs documenting the memorial tattoos of Marines recently returned from the Iraq war, examines corporeality in the context of masculinity, nationalism and mourning. Featured in the LA Times, the work was exhibited in High Desert Test Sites 05 in 2006, the Torrance Art Museum in 2007, and represented Pasadena City College in the Pasadena Art Alliance’s 2007 Festival of Art and Ideas, “Skin.”

Heffernan has exhibited her work in many cities including Los Angeles, New York, Austria, Berlin, and Montreal. Her photographs are included in numerous private and public collections, including the UCLA/Hammer Museum, Light Work of Syracuse, NY, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Heffernan received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1994 and was a Whitney Independent Study fellow in 1994-1995. She is Associate Professor of Sculpture and Photography and has taught at Occidental College for six years.