Helen R Klebesadel
Madison, Wisconsin
Helen Klebesadel is an artist, arts activist, educator, and creativity coach who maintains her studio in Madison, WI USA
Message
Helen Klebesadel is an artist, educator, and an arts activist. Born and raised in rural Wisconsin, her art is the place where she explores her deepest values. She maintains her art studio in Madison-Wisconsin. Helen is best known for her environmental and women centered watercolors painted on paper, board, and canvas. Helen’s watercolors push the traditional boundaries of the medium in scale, content, and technique. Ranging in size from the intimate to the monumental, her paintings are transparent watercolors on paper, Aquabord, and canvas. She starts with detailed drawings, developing the images with layer upon layer of color washes and dry brush technique mixed with occasional areas of wet-into-wet spontaneity. (She can be contacted for a studio visit at Helen(At)Klebesadel(dot)Com)/
She is currently represented by Wisconsin-based virtual art gallery Artful Home. Her current watercolor series entitled 'Pollinator Effect' is on display in Madison, Wisconsin at Olbrich Botanical Gardens until the end of August 2025. It was on display in the Steinhauer Trust Art Gallery at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison, Wisconsin for May-June 2025. You can also see a virtual exhibition of her earlier prairie paintings here in Pollinator Effect: Prairie Watercolors. Klebesadel be doing an art residency, sharing her paintings at at Serendipity Labs in Madison, from mid-September-November 2025. In November-December 2025 her artworks will be included in an exhibition at the Carnelian Gallery in Madison Wisconsin, and in December she will present a solo exhibition at the Beloit Art Center in Beloit, WI.
The Bergstrom-Mahler Museum presented her first solo museum exhibition in 1994. Her paintings have been exhibited in several American Embassies abroad. Helen's watercolor paintings are now in numerous public, private, university, hospital, and museum collections, including the permanent collections of the Museum of Wisconsin Art and The Racine Art Museum. The Copelouzos Family Art Museum in Athens, Greece acquired her work in 2020. Her artwork is represented in the art collections of the American Council on Education, the Racine Art Museum, university collections, including Lawrence University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and medical facilities including UW Hospitals and Clinics, Central Wisconsin Center, the Dubuque Medical Clinic, the St. Francis Medical Center in Grand Island, Nebraska as well as numerous private collections. Several of her watercolors addressing environmental themes are also in the collections of the UW-Madison's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, as well as the University’s Trout Lake Research Station. Helen’s public commissions include a twelve-foot quilt watercolor for Ellen and Peter Johnson HospiceCare Residence, and a series of large watercolors for the University Hospitals and Clinics in Madison, Wisconsin.
Helen attended Layton School of Art in Milwaukee in 1971 and 1972, but dropped out in her sophomore year. After a decade traveling and running a house painting business called 'Painted Ladies' before returning to pursue her university education in art in 1981. Klebesadel went on to earn her BS in Art with a certificate in Women’s Studies, and a MFA in visual art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She later became a certified Creativity Coach to advance her efforts to support and mentor other artists.
A popular and experienced educator, Helen has taught University and community courses and workshops on creativity, studio art, and the contemporary women’s art movement for three decades. Helen taught studio art and chaired the art department at Lawrence University from 1990-2000, before leaving to accept the position of Director of the University of Wisconsin System’s Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium in 2000. She also served as Director of the Wisconsin Regional Art Program for UW-Madison Continuing Studies from 2013-2016. Helen retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall of 2018, to pursue full time art making while offering private workshops and creativity coaching.
Helen Klebesadel’s watercolors and prose have been published in Frontiers, Feminist Studies, Interweave, CALYX and Femspec. Additionally her creative work has been documented in books and exhibition catalogues, including the 2022 book from the Cedarburg Art Museum, A Creative Place: The History of Wisconsin Art. Her art can be seen on many book covers with subjects focused on art, eco-feminism, spirituality, and creativity.
Helen Klebesadel is a past national president of the national Women’s Caucus for Art (1994-96). In 2021 she was the recipient of the national Women’s Caucus for Art International Caucus’s United Nations Program Honor Roll recognition, an award designed to recognize important artist/activists who have made significant contributions to the field. Klebesadel served as a member of the Madison City Arts Commission from 2003-2006 and a citizen member of the Wisconsin Arts Board (WAB) from 2006-2013. Helen has also served in leadership roles on the boards of the Grassroots Leadership College, and the National Women’s Studies Association. In 2023 Klebesadel was named as one of 50 Wisconsin Artists for 50 Years recognized by the Wisconsin Arts Board in celebration of the organization's 50th Anniversary. She was a finalist for the Dane County Forward Women Art Prize in 2023.
Helen created a video in February 2021 for a women's and gender studies conference in which she talks about her experiences and influences as a feminist and an artist: Painting An Artist's Life
Her art website can be seen at Klebesadel.com and available artworks by theme can be found at Klebesadel on Artwork Archive.
Helen is represented by Wisconsin-based virtual art gallery Artful Home.
Her teaching. consulting and coaching information can be found here: http://CreativityLessons.com
Her two ongoing collaborative art projects are:
The Exquisite Uterus Project with artist Alison Gates and 200 other artists.
The Flowers Are Burning: An Art and Climate Justice Project with artist Mary Kay Neumann
Statement
“My visual concerns run the gamut from careful study to poetic, symbolic and sometimes political representations of nature and human nature.”
My visual concerns run the gamut from careful study to poetic, symbolic and sometimes political representations of nature and human nature. I am best known for watercolors on paper and canvas. In my nature-based paintings I consider our place in the landscape and our relationship, as humans, to nature. My paintings consider and raise questions about the effect of our actions on the world. The imagery is motivated by the complex realities and consequences of our changing climate (social, political and environmental) and on the nature world that we depend upon. Throughout the world there are peoples who are re-imagining what it means to be human, what it means to lead a good life, and what it means to be good stewards of the earth at the same time. Many of my artworks imagine how the circulatory system and nervous system of our bodies echo those of the planet. As an artist I seek to acknowledge the meaning and magic that is inherent in our everyday experience as a part of nature, to notice that nature is watching and wondering how long it will take us to realize we ARE nature. What we do to ourselves we do to the earth, and what we do to the earth we do to ourselves.