Helen R Klebesadel
Madison, Wisconsin
Helen Klebesadel is an artist, activist, teacher, and creativity coach who maintains her studio in Madison, WI USA
MessageHelen Klebesadel is an artist, an educator, and an activist. Born and raised in rural Wisconsin, her art is the place where she explores how we learn our deepest values. Best known for her environmental and women centered watercolors, she uses the creative process to re-examine and re-present narratives that often resist and contest existing power structures simply by revealing they exist.
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 and canvas. She starts with detailed drawings and developing the images with layer upon layer of color washes and dry brush technique mixed with occasional areas of wet-into-wet spontaneity.
In 2024 her art can be seen as a part of Watercolor Wisconsin at the Racine Art Museum's Wustum Galleries from December 10, 2023 until April. Her large scale watercolor will also be on display at the Museum of Wisconsin Art as a part of the Wisconsin Biennial from February 3, 2024 into April 2024. You can see a virtual exhibition of her paintings here in Pollinator Effect: Prairie Watercolors
Helen exhibits her work nationally and internationally, including invitations to show her watercolors in several American Embassies through the Arts in the Embassies Program. The Bergstrom-Mahler Museum presented her first solo museum exhibition in 1994. 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, UW-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 and 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 watercolor for Ellen and Peter Johnson HospiceCare Residence, and a series of large watercolors for the new University Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin.
Klebesadel earned her BS, a certificate in Women’s Studies, and a MFA in art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has taught courses and workshops on creativity, studio art, and the contemporary women’s art movement for two decades. Helen taught studio art and chaired the art department at Lawrence University from 1990-2000, before leaving to accepting the position of Director of the University of Wisconsin System’s Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium in 2000. Helen retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to pursue full time art making, private workshops and creativity coaching in the fall of 2018. She maintains her art studio in Madison-Wisconsin.
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.
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 Wisconsin Arts Board as a member from 2006-2013, and on the Madison City Arts Commission from 2003-2006. 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.
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
Helen's art website can be seen at Klebesadel.com
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.
© 2023 Helen R. Klebesadel. All Rights Reserved.
Art website Klebesadel.com
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