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MAUREEN
KELLEHER: biography
My father graduated The U.S. Military Academy
at West Point in 1942. Years later he returned to "The Point"
where he taught the cadets. I was born at West Point in the spring
of 1959, the eighth of eight daughters of Mary Jo and Jim Kelleher.
I grew up in Fort Bragg, NC and Fayetteville,
NC. Then I moved around to Colorado, Texas, and California. I ended
up in Florida where I attended high school and college. I graduated
the University of Florida in 1982 with a BA in philosophy.
After college, I turned down a Peace Corps
assignment and moved instead to New Orleans where I held a number
of odd jobs: painter of houses, painter of fences, fry cook, secretary,
typesetter, house mother to the mentally retarded, social worker.
Throughout those years, I also did activist work with an Amnesty
International case based out of Destrehan, Louisiana (a town about
20 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans). By great fortune,
I was trained to be a private investigator. I focused on post-conviction
habeas work, fact investigation, i.e., I work with attorneys who
represent men on death row.
I never left New Orleans on an evacuation order
prior to Katrina in 2005. In 2001, when one million-plus citizens
left The Crescent City per the mayor's order, I hunkered down in
my apartment, lit candles, ate nuts, and read David Leeming's biography
of James Baldwin. That decision to not evacuate, but instead to
stay put and read a book, was responsible for me becoming an artist.
I emerged 36 hours later from my makeshift bunker with an idea for
an art piece, an idea born in the words Baldwin wrote to his brother
about racism. I juxtaposed Baldwin's advice to his brother with
the only piece of advice my father ever gave me. That idea became
my piece JAMES, and then the creative floodgate opened wide. On
8/29/05 I evacuated from New Orleans, about 12 hours before Hurricane
Katrina hit. Five days later I drove into Hoboken, NJ and have been
here ever since. I'm a Yankee returned home. |
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