Assistant Professor & Director of Printmaking
Office: College Hall C218
Phone: (703)993-1013
Email: hfrederi@gmu.edu
Office Hours: By Appointment Only
Syllabi: AVT104, AVT495, Digital Books
Professional Activities:
Helen C. Frederick, Professor, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA (B.F.A., M.F.A., Rhode Island School of Design) and Founder, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, Silver Spring, MD is a distinguished print, paper, book arts and electronic media artist. As founder of Pyramid Atlantic in 1981, she has been responsible for the development of the organization into an internationally recognized arts center, organizing cultural exchange programs, exhibitions and creating print media publications that are represented in museums around the world. Her work has been included in the international exhibitions Crossing Over/Changing Places (traveling 1991-1997), Nature and Paper, International Biennial of Paper Art, Leopold-Hoesch Museum, Duren, Germany (1992), and Solar House, Centro Colombo Americano, Colombia (1995). Selected solo exhibitions include: Caution, Appearance (Dis)Appearance, the Emerson Gallery, McLean Center for the Arts, McLean, Virginia, 1995; Under Construction, Relay, Rewind, Record in the Dieu Donne Gallery, New York, 1996, and The View is Daunting that was featured at the Lamar Dodd Gallery, University of Athens, Athens, GA, 2002. Selected group exhibitions include: Collaboration as A Medium, 25 Years of Pyramid Atlantic, historical document and traveling exhibition curated by Jane Farmer and Helen Frederick, 2005, and Faces of the Fallen, America’s Artists Honor America’s Heroes, Women In Military Service for America Memorial, Washington, DC, 2005.
Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the National Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and The Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA among many others. Frederick is represented in Who's Who in American Art, 1990-present, and was awarded the 2000 Governor’s Award in the State of Maryland for Excellence in the Arts. In 2004, Frederick was invited as a delegate to speak at the International Print Conference, Print Kontakt in Berlin. She also teaches nationally as a lecturer and resident artist at various colleges, universities, and museums and brings these perspectives and experiences to her teaching, research and art. Frederick has served as a juror for many national exhibitions and public art and architecture panels and projects, is invited as a curator, lecturer and juror throughout the United States. She serves as a state appointed member on the Maryland/Kanagawa Sister State Program, 2006 for cultural exchange.
Since her 1996 teaching appointment at George Mason University, Frederick has developed an established graduate and undergraduate program in the greater Washington metropolitan region that is also noted nationally. Frederick brings a unique and powerful connection to George Mason that gives students a multifaceted, real-life professional art world, taught by a proactive artist and role model. As an educator and arts administrator, Frederick provide students the opportunity to observe (and have opportunities to assist) her performance of responsibilities that include studio collaborations with artists and program development, including international visiting artist residency programs, special cultural exchange projects, joint venture publishing, the development and coordination of workshops, interns and apprenticeship programs, strategic and facility planning. Students participate in these projects, co-curate exhibitions, and are credited in catalogs for their research, writing and other documentation of their work. Frederick has created numerous internships and other experiential learning roles for Mason students in her specialized interdisciplinary programs using printmaking, bookmaking and textual studies for students of all ages and college level programs.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
I believe the arts celebrate individual expression bringing us together to investigate our lives and immediate environments and to explore what is distant and unknown to us.
My lifelong focus lies in capturing narratives about transformation serving now as witness to the virtual world collision with the immanent resistance of physical life. I have a love of nature, sound, and cultural reference. My work in various media has reflected on the universal themes of regeneration and decay, age and mortality, fear and the sublimity of natural phenomena, chaos and resolution, perceptual and conceptual space as developed in intimate hand held objects or site-specific installations. To that end my work combines art with ecology, history and the shape of the language. Interacting with media collaborators, I produce installation elements that become visual metaphors, reflecting upon inner life and considering ways to provide grounds for optimism.
Believing that the new media alternatives have their ancestry in the white of paper and the essence of celluloid, I use the essential information carriers of paper and electronic media as my expressive materials. Through the transformative qualities of these materials, I am interested in investigating where the visible and invisible lay side by side. References to the way I reflect upon these elements are intended to identify the sense of self in the 21st century.
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY:
It is my belief that art can be defined as a journey of human experience. Although I cannot teach how one will reveal the journey, I can set the stage to foster the possibilities of how one tunes in the channel and translates findings into visual content through the manipulation of process and concept. The following criteria serve as the principles that inform my teaching:
1. To provide students with rich opportunities to appreciate art as a cultural and universal, yet personal dialogue and human experience.
2. To provide solid instruction in technical skills through the ability to realize a visual goal. This involves investing in research, analyzing works of arts in order to discover models and guides; and securing some seamless approaches for form and content.
3. To provide an education in basic design principles focusing on visual literacy (with a particular bent of meaningfully infusing language into the curriculum) and the notion that before one can break the rules, one must fully understand them.
4. To provide guidance in conceptual development, for which I ask students to be circumspect when making visual statements by considering multiple levels of interpretation to any given problem with the hope that they might better understand theirs and others’ explorations.
5.To provide encouragement, skills and the opportunity for developing successful outcomes, during and after a student's academic career.
