Riva Helfond (1910-2002) was born in Brooklyn, NY. She spent part of her childhood in Russia and returned to New York at the age of eleven. She studied at the Art Students League with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Morris Kantor, and Harry Sternberg. In the early 1930s, under the WPA, she was an instructor at the Harlem Art Center (the master printer, Robert Blackburn, was her student) and worked on the printmaking project. Among her friends were artists Willem DeKooning, and Arshile Gorky, and from the Cedar Tavern, Franz Kline and the critic Harold Rosenberg. In 2009 work by Helfond was featured in Industrial Strength, Precisionism in New Jersey, at the Jersey City Museum.
Among those permanent collections with work by Riva Helfond are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the Brooklyn Museum; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Boston Public Library; the Newark Museum and Newark Public Library, New Jersey; the Cincinnati Art Museum; the University of Kentucky Art Museum; the Center for the Arts and the Wolfsonian Foundation, Miami; the Los Angeles County Museum; the National Museum of American Art and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; and the British Museum, London.
Information from Susan Teller Gallery, NYC
