Riva Helfond

WPA Woman Artist Modernist Abstract Print

1965

Title: Non Scientific Time 32 color screenprint on 100% rag handmade, shaped deckle edged paper. hand signed in pencil, stamped and numbered. Sandy Kinnee is known for paper making...

Title: Guide 32 color screenprint on 100% rag handmade, shaped deckle edged paper. with applied glitter. hand signed in pencil, stamped and numbered from edition of 33. Sandy Kinnee...

Riva Helfond (1910–2002) was an American artist and printmaker best known for her social realist studies of working people's lives. Riva Helfond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family. She spent some of her childhood in Russia and returned to New York at the age of eleven, living in New York or New Jersey for most of the rest of her life. Between 1928 and 1940, she studied at the School of Industrial Art and the Art Students League; her teachers included William von Schlegell, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Morris Kantor for painting and Harry Sternberg for printmaking. Among her fellow students were Alexander Brook and her future husband, the sculptor William (Bill) Barrett. Helfond began teaching in the College Art Association Program (1933–36) and then taught printmaking at the Harlem Arts Community Center (1936–38). Initially she taught lithography alongside Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and others before moving to the graphic arts division, where she worked with Louis Lozowick and Jacob Kainen, and the silkscreen division, which was supervised by Anthony Velonis and which had Harry Gottlieb and Elizabeth Olds as founding members. Among her students at the Center was Robert Blackburn, who would go on to found New York's Printmaking Workshop in the 1940s. Later on, Helfond taught printmaking at New York University (1964), and she was on the faculty of Union College in Cranford, New Jersey, from 1980 onwards. From 1936 to 1941, Helfond was an artist in the New York Works Progress Administration program's graphics division, creating work in a variety of media, including lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, aquatints, collograph, and silkscreens. Some of her work shows the impact that color had as it entered American printmaking during this period, and she was adventurous in exploring the possibilities opened up by screen printing. She printed...

Abstract Hebrew Prints on heavy mould made paper from small edition of 15. there is a facing page of text in Hungarian folded over. Hard edged geometric abstract prints in color base...

"Vegetable Forms No. 9" "1st State" is a beautiful linear design woodcut of an artichoke. What is intellectually interesting is the fractal beauty of nature found in the artichoke. A fractal is a kind of pattern that we observe often in nature and in art. Whenever you observe a series of patterns repeating over and over again, at many different scales, and where any small part resembles the whole, that’s a fractal. The Artichoke is the perfect example in that the shape of the leaves repeat themselves and they are the same shape as the fruit itself. Fractals are exciting, not only for their mathematical or conceptual representation, but also for the fact that you can visualise the math—and it’s beautiful! This print is rendered in an intense green with a light blue color to delineate the intriguing linear element of the artichoke's leaves. Joyce Tilley Nagel...

"Grid Melt" is one of the monoprints that Joyce Nagel so enjoyed creating. Being a monoprint makes this piece totally unique and unlike any of the other pi...

Wave I by Christian Stoll 40 x 40 inches (102 x 102cm) edition of 25 signed 58 x 58 inches (147 x 147cm) edition of 7 signed 48 x 48 inches (122 x 122cm) edition of 7 signed arch...

Myril Adler "Knight" c.1960s Collagraph ink on paper 2"x5" site unframed edition 2/50 Signed and titled in pencil Myril Adler, was born on September 22, 1...