Helen Klebesadel Biography
“My visual concerns run the gamut from careful study to poetic, symbolic and
sometimes political representations of nature and human nature.”
Helen Klebesadel is an artist, an educator and creativity coach, and an activist. Born and raised in rural Wisconsin, her art has become the place where she explores how we learn our deepest values. Best known for her environmental and women centered watercolors, she is particularly interested in how myths and stories socialize us to have different expectations for some people than from others. She uses the creative process to re-examine and re-present narratives that resist and contest existing power structures 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.
Her coaching, consulting, and teaching draws upon what she learned along the way on her journey to becoming an artist and educator. Her path from growing up as Wisconsin farm girl to becoming and artist, teacher, and university professor/administrator required her to learn how to overcome society's low expectations for women and those with fewer resources. For her the largest challenges were personal. Helen works with her collaborators, clients, and students to take apart the challenges and determine how to best move, through, over, or around the barriers we each find in our lives.
Today Helen Klebesadel exhibits her work nationally and internationally, including being invited 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, Lawrence University, 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.
Helen 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 Studies Consortium in 2000. In January 2013 the Women’s Studies Consortium’s administrative home shifted to the UW-Madison Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.
An educator, Helen contributed a chapter entitled Re-Framing Studio Art Critique and Practice, to the book New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction, and co-authored with Lisa Kornetsky the chapter, Critique as signature pedagogy in the arts, in Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits.
Helen Klebesadel’s watercolors and prose have been published in Frontiers, Feminist Studies, Interweave, CALYX and Femspec. Most recently her work was included in 100 Artists of the Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin, published in June 2012 by E.Ashley Rooney, and her art and activism is included in the book, Vision, Passion & Purpose: ARTISTS As World Changers, by Renee Phillips.
Helen Klebesadel is a past national president of the national Women’s Caucus for Art and served on the Wisconsin Arts Board as a citizen member from 2006-2013. And served as Director of the UW-Madison Division of Continuing Studies’ Wisconsin Regional Art Program from 2013-3016. Originally started by artist John Steuart Curry, this program has offered exhibition and creative growth and artistic educational opportunities for Wisconsin artists for over 75 years.
Check out how the Artsy Shark blog which featured Helen’s work recently.
Purchase Helen Klebesadel's paintings and Prints
See Helen's portfolio and blog on her artist website Klebesadel.com
Find Helen's painting and prints on Etsy
Find Helen's paintings and prints at Artful Home.
Helen's fabric Designs can be found print-on-demand at Spoonflower.com
Order prints of some of Helen's hard to find work on FineArtAmerica
Find Helen's painting and prints on Etsy
Find Helen's paintings and prints at Artful Home.
Helen's fabric Designs can be found print-on-demand at Spoonflower.com
Order prints of some of Helen's hard to find work on FineArtAmerica