Helen's profile

As an artist, I focus attention on places that are often overlooked or inaccessible, capturing the remarkable variety of ways that wind and water shape the landscape. My photographs and photo-based sculptures take you on a journey through these spaces and illuminate the interacting forces affecting environments and ecosystems, including human activity, from the remote polar environments of Antarctica and Greenland to urban Los Angeles and Baltimore. Engaging with landscapes through the process of photography, I 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.

Some projects arise from my own investigations, some from interaction with field scientists. I exhibit my work in public and for-profit art galleries and academic institutions. Accompanying programs such as audio tours and gallery talks bring these topics to life for audiences of all ages. This portfolio focuses on two projects: Kangerlussuaq: Cold War, Warming Climate is a work in progress that I plan to publish as a photo book about Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, a former indigenous hunting ground that served as a Cold War US air base from 1941 to 1992, which altered the landscape ecologically and culturally. Walking in Antarctica consists of photographs, sculptures from 3D scans of geological formations, and a first-person audio tour, resulting from a seven-week residency in Antarctica in 2015 through the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.

Kangerlussuaq: Cold War, Warming Climate — 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. A Rubys Award grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation funded the first of three extended trips there in 2021. In 2023 she collaborated with Dorthe Katrine Olsen, director of the Sisimiut and Kangerlussuaq Museums, to mount a permanent two-room exhibition featuring her photographs at the Kangerlussuaq Museum, funded by a cultural grant from the US Embassy in Copenhagen. 

Walking in Antarctica — 33 of the photographs and 4 sculptures from this project accompanied by 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 seven venues in six states scheduled through summer 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 was also put on view in 2023 for 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.
 
Bio — 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.

You have not yet created a curated collection!