Riva Helfond was an American artist and printmaker best known for her social realist studies of working people's lives.
12 Facts About Riva Helfond
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Riva Helfond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family.
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Riva Helfond 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.
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Riva Helfond was brought in to set up the Center's printmaking program.
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Later on, Riva Helfond taught printmaking at New York University, and she was on the faculty of Union College in Cranford, New Jersey, from 1980 onwards.
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From 1936 to 1941, Riva 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.
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Riva Helfond 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.
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Riva Helfond ran into several obstacles while working in the coal districts of Pennsylvania.
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Riva Helfond's work was included in the 1940 MoMA show American Color Prints Under $10.
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Riva Helfond was included in the 1947 and 1951 Dallas Museum of Fine Arts exhibitions of the National Serigraph Society.
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Riva Helfond's work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Newark Museum of Fine Arts, and elsewhere.
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Riva Helfond counted as friends a wide circle of Abstract Expressionist artists and critics, including Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, and Harold Rosenberg.