Two groundbreaking exhibits at Cascadia Art Museum are A Legacy Rediscovered: Northwest Women Artists, 1920-1970 and Building a Dream: Z. Vanessa Helder and Artists of the Inland Northwest. What a special pairing! 

David Martin, our treasured curator of mid-twentieth century modernism in the Northwest, curated both of these exhibits. The first introduces a group of artists each of whom demonstrate a knowledge of a main direction in twentieth century art: impressionism, realism, surrealism, abstraction. In the second, he assembled a group of Z. Vanessa Helder’s Grand Coulee Dam watercolors, as well as a selection of work by her students.

Several of the women in A Legacy Rediscovered are well-known, although not always for the type of work in the exhibit. Doris Chase became known for her large abstract sculptures, videos, and films, Myra Wiggins for her pictorialist photography, and Yvonne Twinning Humber for her realism and magic realism. Some of these women came from or were able to study on the East Coast, at major art schools, and with prominent teachers. The Women Painters of Washington, formed by Myra Wiggins in 1930, became a focal point for many women in Seattle.

The back stories of these artists can help with understanding how they chose their subjects. Peggy Strong for example, suffered a paralyzing car accident in 1933. This led to her identification with other people who were struggling, particularly African Americans. As with so many of these artists, the government art programs provided opportunities such as mural painting and printmaking that otherwise would not have been available.

In this exhibit, we see several mural studies by Lucia Wiley from a series called Youth Marches On. She worked in true fresco and later won a national award as an outstanding mural painter. As we look at these studies we see a range of approaches and a sophisticated organization of space. Later she converted to be a sister in the Community of the Holy Spirit in New York City and taught in their schools for many years.

Vivian Kidwell Griffin stands out as an early surrealist in the 1930s even as her entire education was in the Northwest. The paintings included by her are unusual and original—she does not follow other familiar surrealist approaches.

Among the abstract artists is Maria Frank whose blue green painting suggests, with its curving pastel greens and blues, quite a different understanding of abstraction than the aggressive forms of the New York based Abstract Expressionists.

Indeed, what emerges from this exhibit is a strong group of women who forged their own careers on their own terms. It is hard to believe they were so successful in the context of the Northwest culture in the mid-twentieth century.

Building a Dream: Z. Vanessa Helder and Artists of the Inland Northwest 

Z. Vanessa Helder studied at the Art Student’s League in New York City on a scholarship in 1934. On returning to Washington state she was hired by the WPA to run the Spokane Arts Center from 1939-41. The center was a hub of creativity featuring theater, writing workshops, and painting until it was closed during World War II.

On her own time, Helder spent two years painting the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, the only woman permitted on the site. She created sketches during the day and watercolor paintings at night. Her precisionist style of clean-cut buildings and industrial sites juxtapose details of the building of the dam with the specific landscape of Northeastern Washington. The compositions include complex diagonals of the industrial equipment set in the swelling hills of the region. She also painted worker housing, although in a precisionist way—no people, no cars, no stores. The small houses stand in for the life in the village of Grand Coulee. Read B Street by Lawney L. Reyes, University of Washington Press (2008), for the rest of the picture.

Widely praised for the Grand Coulee paintings, they are still her best known work. It was a fortuitous conjunction of her initiative in seeking out this subject, inspired by her precisionist perspective, and her sophisticated approach to both medium and composition.

In a second room of the exhibit are works by her students including the later well-known Alden Mason. Each work tells us that these artists learned from Helder, but went their own way.

Susan Noyes Platt 

Susan Noyes Platt writes for local, national, and international publications and her website is www.artandpoliticsnow.com.

Building a Dream: Z. Vanessa Helder and Artists of the Inland Northwest is on view through September 29 and A Legacy Rediscovered: Northwest Women Artists through January 5 at Cascadia Art Museum, located at 190 Sunset Avenue S., Edmonds, Washington. Hours are Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information www.cascadiaartmuseum.org.