The (Re) Generative Studio with Helen O’Leary and Kyle Staver

An open-ended, rigorous Independent Study POD centered on dialogue, critique, experimentation, and sustained engagement with participants’ work.

This POD creates a space for artists working across disciplines to deepen their practices through conversation, close looking, material investigation, and critical exchange. Through the complementary perspectives of Helen O’Leary and Kyle Staver, participants will engage questions of process, structure, intuition, and why we make what we make.

POD Format

Sessions include:

• Artist presentations and group critique

• Discussions around form, material, and process

• Conversations on sustainability, experimentation, and studio ethics

• Critical dialogue focused on development and risk-taking

• Readings, visual references, and participant-led discussion

• Occasional guest conversations drawn from the artists’ extended communities

In addition to group meetings, the POD will emphasize sustained engagement with individual practices through focused feedback, responsive mentorship, and evolving dialogue over the course of the program.

Studio Focus

This POD will move between material specificity and broader conceptual questions around making.

Areas of exploration may include:

• Sculpture, painting, and interdisciplinary approaches to form

• Material intelligence, reuse, repair, and sustainable studio practice

• Process-based methodologies and experimental structures

• Composition, figuration, narrative, and evolving visual language

• Strategies for navigating uncertainty, revision, and productive failure

• Building long-term studio habits that sustain inquiry and growth

Drawing in part from The Sustainable Studio, developed by Helen with artist Kim Flick, the POD will also consider how ecological thinking and regenerative practices can inform the studio—not as an add-on, but as part of how work is conceived and produced.

Kyle will bring a parallel emphasis on painting as a site of invention, discipline, and risk—opening conversations around image-making, intuition, structure, and the long arc of sustaining a vital practice.

Guest visitors may include artists, curators, and thinkers whose practices resonate with themes of material experimentation, sustainability, and contemporary studio practice.

These sessions will offer expanded perspectives on artistic practice and navigating life in the art world.

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.