Through April 20th, 2024

Philadelphia Art Alliance at UArts is proud to present (re)FOCUS: Mary Carlson, Karen Kilimnik, June Leaf, Ellen Lesperance, Helen O’Leary, Liliana Porter, and Ana Tiscornia, an important multi-generational group exhibit that features varied works that probe the human condition through singular images and handmade processes. No one style is represented here, but rather a panoply, with feminist and world political allusions, art historical references, wry appropriation, DIY bricolage, and craft sensibilities in a range of media. For Leaf, Lesperance, and O’Leary, this will be the first time they have been presented locally.

(re)FOCUS is an exciting and essential component of the important city-wide commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts—a grassroots feminist project and one of the first large-scale surveys of the work of American women—which culminated in over 150 exhibitions, panels, lectures, workshops, and demonstrations.

Taken together, the personal historic mythologies and structures of these seven artists provide a compelling visual chronicle of the enormous strengths, diversity, politics, and subtle sensitivities of women working today.

Irish-born Helen O’Leary’s mysterious ramshackle assemblages are cobbled-together amalgams of support and subsistence. Reconfiguring armatures from found wood, O’Leary’s works are stuccoed over with handmade paints scavenged from specific locales that reveal their transcendental histories like minimalist arte povera icons. Blurring the boundaries between object and image and construction and restoration, they refashion studio castoffs into elegiac stoic abstractions bearing echoes of a poignant past. Her constructions repair the wounds of entropy and are hopeful and conciliatory.

Educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, O’Leary lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey, and County Leitrim, Ireland, and is a professor at Penn State University, where she has taught since 1991. O’Leary has shown widely internationally and  been honored with a Hennessy Purchase Prize for the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, American Academy in Rome, Yaddo, and MacDowell, amongst others.