The Working Studio with Helen O’Leary and Kyle Staver

Join Helen O’Leary and Kyle Staver—friends and colleagues for decades—for an open-ended, freewheeling Independent Study POD.

While the format encourages exploration and dialogue, there will be a strong underlying structure—paired with warm, supportive conversation, storytelling, and shared insights into their lives, careers, and experiences navigating the art world. Central to the program is a rigorous engagement with your work through thoughtful critique.

Helen will offer insight into building and maintaining a green, sustainable studio, along with her innovative and material-driven approach to sculpture. Kyle will share her deep mastery of materials—from printmaking and works on paper to her painted plaster bas-relief studies, which inform her large-scale paintings.

These two uncompromising artists—Helen, a master of three-dimensional work, and Kyle, an exceptional oil painter—will bring their knowledge, discipline, and sensitivity to the group. Together, they will provide a critical yet supportive framework as participants explore their own practices.

This is a space to learn from one another—regardless of medium or subject—and to better understand not only how we make work, but why we make. 

Helen O’Leary (b. 1961, County Wexford, Ireland) is an Irish-born, American-based artist known for her distinctive constructions that blur the line between painting and sculpture. She works primarily with salvaged materials—cut fragments of previous paintings, wood, linen, and studio remnants—assembling them into layered, abstract forms that explore memory, history, and the physical language of materials.

O’Leary studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin before moving to the United States, where she earned both her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her practice is often described as “dismantling and rebuilding painting,” creating three-dimensional, frame-like structures that carry traces of earlier works. These pieces function as paintings with their own architecture and accumulated history, reflecting her ongoing interest in transformation, material reuse, and cultural identity shaped between Ireland and the United States.

Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, SFMOMA, and The MAC in Belfast. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Awards, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.

Since 1991, O’Leary has taught at Penn State University’s School of Visual Arts, where she has influenced generations of artists. She lives and works between Jersey City, New Jersey and Ireland, maintaining a transatlantic practice that continues to inform the sensibility of her work.

Kyle Staver (b. 1953, Minnesota, USA) is an American painter known for her exuberant, large-scale figurative works that draw on mythology, biblical narratives, and art history. Her paintings are characterized by rich color, energetic brushwork, and a distinctive balance between monumentality and intimacy.

Staver studied at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design before earning her MFA from Yale University. Her work engages deeply with historical painting traditions while reinterpreting them through a contemporary lens, often centering female figures in scenes of transformation, allegory, and psychological complexity.

Working primarily in oil on canvas, Staver builds her compositions through a process of layering and revision, resulting in surfaces that feel both immediate and deeply worked. Her figures—often drawn from mythological or literary sources—are rendered with a sense of physical presence and emotional ambiguity, combining humor, gravity, and sensuality.

Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, with solo exhibitions at institutions such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and numerous gallery shows. She has received several major awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and an Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Staver lives and works in New York and continues to be a vital voice in contemporary figurative painting, known for her commitment to the possibilities of paint and her ability to reinvent historical narratives through a personal and expressive visual language.