Riva Helfond
| Riva Helfond | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 8, 1910 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Died | May 13, 2002 (aged 92) Plainfield, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Riva Helfond Barrett, Riva Barrett Helfond |
| Occupation | printmaker, artist |
| Spouse(s) | William (Bill) Barrett (sculptor) |
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 (d. 1967).
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 all of her own work, which ranged from austere, often monochromatic social realist portraits of working people and cityscapes in the 1920s and 1930s to colorful, abstract, lyrical landscapes in later years. Some of her color abstractions originated as watercolors from nature during travels in Greece and France and were then turned into oil paintings.
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