Over the past four decades, Brooklyn painter and art professor Julie Heffernan has questioned traditional roles for women in fantastical works that channel art history and champion female agency. Her latest body of work lauds women who have stood up to power in portraits that hang alongside framed paintings that reverse typical art historical power relations. In the background here, Heffernan’s reworks Rubens’ ‘Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus,’ by replacing a man with a woman on horseback, making her rescuer rather than perpetrator. (On view at PPOW Gallery in Chelsea through Oct 6th).
