Helen Glazer’s work in photography and photogrammetry-based sculpture is informed by scientific insights into interacting forces affecting ecosystems and shaping landscapes, including the impact of human activity and decisions. She has spent her entire career since her early 20s as a working artist. Over time, her focus shifted from drawing and painting, to painted sculpture, to a current emphasis on photography and photo-based sculpture combining digital fabrication and hand finishing. She has also completed two large public art projects. Photography became central to her process about 15 years ago to investigate and understand complex, ephemeral forms in nature, and capture the quirky incidents and surprising and evocative moments of transformation. Her past experiences working in other media still inform the way she perceives the world and presents it in her photographs. In 2013 she began exploring new photographic technologies, creating 3D scans from still photographs via photogrammetry and producing hand-painted sculpture from them, a process she continues to refine.
In 2015 she completed a year-long project as Baltimore Ecosystem Study artist-in-residence and spent seven weeks in Antarctica as a National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grantee. The solo exhibition Walking in Antarctica, based on her travels there, premiered in 2017 at Goucher College, Baltimore, funded with grants from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and Puffin Foundation. The show is touring the US under the auspices of ExhibitsUSA (eusa.org) for 5 years starting 2022 (see CV below for list of past and upcoming venues). Two photos from the project enlarged to 7 x 10 feet are in a rotating exhibition at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. One also was also installed for most of 2023 in an outdoor exhibition of billboard size photographs by international photographers at the Palacio de Las Aguas Corrientes, Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art houses her Antarctica archive and has one of her Antarctic sculptures in its collection. She has been interviewed by Vice Media’s Creators Project, AtlasObscura.com, Adobe 99U Magazine, and Baltimore’s NPR news station. In 2012 she received an Individual Artist Award in photography from the Maryland State Arts Council and had a solo show of her photographs at Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York. She received a grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation to fund a photography project begun in 2021 of the former US Sondrestrom Air Base in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland for an eventual book. The Kangerlussuaq Museum received a grant from the US Embassy in Copenhagen to mount a permanent two-room exhibition of her photographs that opened in 2023. One of her Greenland photographs is also included in the book The New Geologic Epoch (ecoartspace, 2023).
Helen graduated cum laude from Yale University with a B.A. in art and earned an M.F.A. from the Mount Royal School of the Maryland Institute, College of Art, also studying at the renowned Skowhegan School of Art. Her works are in private and public collections, including the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. She has also published articles about art-making and artists, in magazines and journals such as Artes, Artpapers and Feminist Studies, as well as over 30 catalog essays about artists for the Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, where she was exhibitions director from 1986 to 1998 and shepherded the exhibitions program to regional prominence. She created a self-guided tour of the Smithsonian Institution museums on the theme of mythology as a Fellow in Museum Practice in 1994-95.