Mary Heilmann

USA Oliver Fellow (New York, NY)

Visual Arts

Mary Heilmann has had a distinguished career as an abstract painter, and was part of the nascent development of conceptual minimalism in New York in the early 1970’s. Her work is reflective of visual events that happened to her personally and she describes her practice as “non-verbal philosophy.” She uses painting to express thoughts, feelings and desires and engage with the outside world. Heilmann has had solo exhibitions at the Kunst Museum in Bonn, the Museum Ludwig, the Orange County Art Museum, the New Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts and the ICA in Boston.  She is the 2012 recipient of the Biennial Award for Contemporary Art from Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, and has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the Anonymous was a Woman Foundation Award. Her work is in numerous public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum.