RIVA HELFOND (1910-2002)
Riva Helfond was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1910. She spent part of her childhood in Russia and returned to New York at the age of eleven. She studied at the Art Students League, with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Morris Kantor, and Harry Sternberg.
In the early 1930s, while still a student herself, she taught painting to children at the Madison Square Boys" Club under the College Arts Association. That program was superseded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) for which Helfond was an instructor of printmaking at the Harlem Art Center. (The master printer, Robert Blackburn, was her student there.) At that time Helfond lived in a loft on West 21st Street, NY. Artist friends were Willem DeKooning who was a neighbor in the building and Arshile Gorky who was a frequent visitor. Others in her circle at that time, especially at the Cedar Tavern, were Franz Kline and the critic Harold Rosenberg.
Always an innovative artist, Helfond subsequently transferred to the Graphic Division of the WPA for which she made lithographs, woodcuts, and serigraphs. She as also made intaglio prints, collagraphs, and embossings. In 1954 she taught at New York University and in the 1980s and 90s was on the faculty of Union County College, New Jersey. She was married to Bill Barrett; he was from the coal mining area of Lansford, Pennsylvania. Their daughter, Nancy, was born in 1943.
A Checklist of Prints was published in conjunction with Riva Helfond, A 90th Birthday, here, at the Susan Teller Gallery, New York City, February 11 through March 18, 2000. Her work was featured here in Mining Prints of the 1930s and 40s, May, 1989; in Riva Helfond, Paintings, Prints, and Drawings, 1931 - 1958, April/May, 1993; and in Industrial Realism, American Painting, 1928 - 1955, October/November, 1997, and mostly recently, Jersey Girls Artists, July 17 through August 21, 2008.
Other one-woman shows were held the Galerie Collete Allendy, Paris, France, in 1957, at the Allan P. Kirby Arts Center, the Lawrenceville School, New Jersey, April, 1993, and the Tomasulo Gallery, Union County College, Cranford, NJ, February, 1999.
Work by Helfond was in included in the World"s Fair, New York, 1939, the travelling exhibition, Artists for Victory, 1943; the Carnegie Institute of Art Biennial, Pittsburgh, 1953; in New York City WPA Art, Parsons School of Design, NY, 1977; and Ten Crucial Years, the Mitchell Wolfson Jr. Collection, Miami-Dade Community College, 1985. Because of her teaching experience, and although she is not African-American, Helfond"s work was featured in Black Printmakers and the WPA, Lehman College, NY, 1989, and also in American Screenprints, 1930s - 1960s, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1991; in L"Amerique de la Depression, Musee Galerie, Paris, France, 1996; in Images from the Federal Art Project, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, 1996; and in Workers" Art Between the Wars, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, 1998. Just recently her work was included in The American Scene, the British Museum, London, April 10 through September 7, 2008.
Among those permanent collections with work by Riva Helfond are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the Brooklyn Museum; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Boston Public Library; the Newark Museum and Newark Public Library, New Jersey; the Cincinnati Art Museum; the University of Kentucky Art Museum; the Center for the Arts and the Wolfsonian Foundation, Miami; the Los Angeles County Museum; the National Museum of American Art and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; and the British Museum, London.
|
|
|
|
