Building a Dream: Z. Vanessa Helder and Artists of the Inland Northwest
Cascadia Art Museum, Edmonds, WA - To Sep 29
Building a Dream does more than what its title promises: it is restoring a reputation for perhaps the most important woman in Northwest art history, Zama Vanessa Helder (1904–1968). Omitted from the standard canon—living in Spokane, entrenched in 1930s realism, dismissed as a woman by the Seattle power elite—Helder is more than redeemed by curator David Martin, who rightly places her at the top of eastern Washington regional art history and probably beyond.
Helder’s precise, exquisite on-the-spot watercolors of the building of the Grand Coulee Dam surpass the views by other artists also featured: Jane Baldwin, Robert O. Engard and Herman Keys. Mostly intimate in scale, their lithographs, woodcuts and etchings seem dainty and tentative next to Helder’s depictions of what became known as the largest hydroelectric plant in the world.
The dam and related extensions of the Columbia River enabled power for the aluminum factories that built World War II fighter planes, literally helping the Allies win the war. The Grand Coulee Dam was surrounded by workers’ shanties in towns like Electric City, all captured by Helder with a poignancy that reminds us that, despite hundreds of jobs on the dam, the Great Depression continued as late as 1940, seen in her Hooverville Grand Coulee (1939–41) and Neighbors (1939–41), with its shared clothesline.
Baldwin is next best with her tiny linocuts of everyday life. Her prints Dancers and Derelict (both 1936–46) and Sailboat Wharf (c. 1938) combine hard times with nostalgic power, but do not transcend the widespread focus on Americana throughout the period that Abstract Expressionism replaced with a vengeance. Thanks to Building a Dream, though, the achievements of these artists are preserved.
