Helena Hernmarck

Helena Hernmarck (born in , 1941) is a Swedish tapestry artist who lives and works in the United States. She is best known for her monumental tapestries designed for architectural settings.

Hernmark's parents were Carl Hernmarck, curator of decorative arts at the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts, and Kerstin Simon, a journalist. Her uncle was the Swedish modernist architect Sven Markelius, one of five authors of the modernist manifesto, Acceptera, published in 1931. Hernmarck studied weaving in Stockholm, first at the Swedish Association of Friends of the Textile Arts, and later at Sweden’s University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. Her primary teacher was Swedish textile artist . She apprenticed with textile designer Alice Lund.

Hernmarck moved to Canada in 1964 and to England in 1972 before moving to New York in 1975, where she joined industrial designer Niels Diffrient, whom she married in 1976. She participated in the Lausanne Biennales of 1965, 1967, and 1969, received a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1973, and a second solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974. In 1973, she received the American Institute of Architects Craftsmanship Medal.

Hernmarck began producing monumental tapestries for corporate settings in the late 1960s, eventually working with architects such as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei and Partners, Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM),George Nelson, Ulrich Franzen, Hugh Stubbins, John Carl Warnecke, Kevin Roche, and others. One of her earliest commissions was for the executive offices of the Weyerhaeuser Company in Seattle, Washington (1970–71) and one of her later commissions was for the Time Warner Center in New York. In 1999, Hernmarck had a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, "Monumental and Intimate," which traveled to Waldemarsudde in Stockholm, Sweden later that year. She participated in the “Sourcing the Museum” exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2012. Her work is held in private, corporate, and museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Chicago Institute of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Hernmarck works at her studio in Connecticut.

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