Baker Artist Portfolios

Helen Glazer's photographs and photogrammetry-based sculpture arise from a search for a deeper understanding of the natural world, informed by scientific insights into interacting forces affecting ecosystems and shaping landscapes, including human behavior and decisions. She is currently working on a photo book project about Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, a former indigenous hunting ground that served as a US air base from 1941 to 1992. Combining her photographs, vintage photos from in Danish and US archives of similar sites, and short texts, the book will show how human decisions and activity over the past 80 years — including melting of the Greenland ice cap due to climate change — have strikingly altered the land and ecology both physically and culturally. Kangerlussuaq has evolved into a distinctive — often surreal and quirky — environment unlike the rest of Greenland. The project builds on her past experiences in Antarctica as a grantee of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program and as a Baltimore Ecosystem Study artist-in-residence to explore human impacts on this polar environment.

Walking in Antarctica, a solo exhibition of photographs, sculptures, and a first-person audio tour premiered at Goucher College, Baltimore, in 2017-18, funded in part by grants from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and Puffin Foundation. It is on a five-year tour of the US under the auspices of ExhibitsUSA (eusa.org) through 2027, with six venues in five states scheduled through early March 2025 to date. Works from the Antarctica project have also been featured in a rotating exhibition at Baltimore-Washington International Airport since 2017, where two photos have been enlarged to 7 x 10 feet. One photo enlarged to billboard size is also on view in a year-long outdoor exhibition of international photographers at the Palacio de las Aguas, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Works from the project have also been shown at Artscape in 2016 and 2017, and in the 2017 Trawick Prize Finalists exhibition. Since 2016, Glazer has been interviewed by several national and local media outlets about Antarctica, including Atlas Obscura and WYPR, and featured on the cover and in the National Academy of Sciences' print magazine "Issues in Science and Technology." The Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art houses her Antarctica archive and purchased one of her sculptures for its collection.
 
Glazer received a Rubys Award grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation in 2019 toward her project in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, and made her first of three annual trips there in 2021 after the pandemic. In 2023 she collaborated with Dorthe Katrine Olsen, the director of the Sisimiut and Kangerlussuaq Museums, to mount a permanent two-room exhibition featuring her photographs at the Kangerlussuaq Museum, funded by the US Embassy in Copenhagen. 
 
Born in Bronx, New York, and raised in suburban New York City, Glazer holds a BA in Art cum laude from Yale University and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and attended Skowhegan School of Art. The first part of her career focused on drawing, painting, and painted wall reliefs. She has been exhibiting her work regularly since she was a graduate student, when a painting was selected for the 1976 Maryland Biennial at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She has also completed two public art mural commissions in Baltimore. Photography, which she studied extensively at Yale, served as a means of recording reference material for paintings and relief sculptures until 15 years ago, when it became her primary mode of expression as a way to capture and communicate the subtleties of complex natural forms. However, her past experiences working in other media still inform the way she perceives the world and presents it in her photographs. In 2013 she expanded her practice to integrate new photographic technologies, creating 3D scans from still photographs via photogrammetry and producing hand-painted sculpture from them, a process she continues to refine.