Born: 30 May 1904, United States
Died: 1 May 1968
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Zama Vanessa Helder
The following is republished from HistoryLink.org, in line with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
The six founders of Women Painters of Washington were Myra Albert Wiggins (1869-1956), Elizabeth Warhanik (1880-1968), Lily Norling Hardwick (1890-1944), Dorothy Dolph Jensen (1895-1977), Anna B. Stone (1869-1950), and Helen Bebb (1878-1947), who acted as an administrator and was not an active painter.
As the 1930s progressed and the country was mired in the Depression, several members of WPW became employed by the Federal Art Projects. One of the most accomplished was Z. Vanessa Helder (1904-1968) one of the state’s few Precisionists.
Helder was born in Lynden, Washington, and attended the University of Washington before going to New York to study at the Art Students League. While still in artschool, she began exhibiting her work with the American Watercolor Society. Her talent was recognized in New York and she began to show her work at the prestigious Macbeth Gallery, which handled many of the leading artists of the day.
Returning to Seattle, she was hired by the local Federal Art Projects and accepted a position as an instructor at the Spokane Art Center, where she taught painting and lithography. During this period of 1939-1941, Helder produced her spectacular series of 22 watercolors depicting the construction of Grand Coulee Dam and its environs. This celebrated series is in the collection of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane.
A high point in her career came in 1943 when she was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s American Realists and Magic Realists exhibition. Helder exhibited 12 of her watercolors in the show and her work hung alongside some of the major American artists of the period. After her marriage in 1943, Helder moved to Los Angeles and became known in California art circles, teaching at the Otis Art Institute and the Los Angeles Art Institute.