Z. Vanessa Helder was born in Lynden, WA and lived in Seattle and Spokane until relocating permanently to Los Angeles in 1943. She studied at the University of Washington and at the Art Students League in New York with Frank Vincent DuMond, George Picken and Robert Brackman.
In 1939, Helder was on staff at the Spokane Arts Center under the sponsorship of the Washington State W.P.A. teaching watercolor, oil painting and lithography. While there, she executed a series of Precisionist watercolors depicting the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam and its environs for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
Helder first gained national attention in 1936 having her work accepted in the American Watercolor Society's exhibition in New York. Her remarkable ability was noticed by Maynard Walker who began representing her at his prestigious New York gallery, which at the time carried some of America's finest artists.
A major accomplishment for the artist was her inclusion in the "Realists and Magic Realists" exhibition at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York in 1943 where she exhibited with major artists such as Edward Hopper.
In addition, she also exhibited at the Whitney & Metropolitan Museums, Oakland, Denver and Seattle Art Museums. She had a one-person exhibition at SAM in 1939.

Vanessa Helder was a member of Women Painters of Washington, the National Association of Women Artists and the American and California Watercolor Societies.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Seattle Art Museum, National Museum of American Art,Smith- sonian Institution, Newark Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Portland Art Museum,The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, The Academy Of Arts And Letters, N.Y., I.B.M. Corporation and the Northwest Museum of Art & Culture in Spokane which is the repository of her complete series of the Grand Coulee Dam construction.

Edmund Giles Tennant, c. 1939
oil on Board, Private Collection

Rocks and Concrete, c. 1940,
watercolor,
Collection of the Northwest Museum
of Arts & Culture, Spokane, WA
Not to be reproduced without permission

"Trees Near Fairfield", c. 1936, lithograph, Private Collection

©David Martin
& the artist's estate.
Do not reproduce text
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from David Martin