Picturing Places and Spaces

In this lithograph Gerardia depicts multi-storied buildings in the city. The façades of the structures look like a complex grid. The lowest level provides access to the building through a series of rectangles, and the other stories are arrangements of irregular cells representing windows. Sometimes they are set into tall, arched spaces with engaged columns to the sides and other times become a dense network of squares or rectangles. The sky is turning dark as night approaches, and light shining through many of the windows indicates people are present in the interior spaces. Some cells are completely dark, while others are filled with patterns of dots, stripes, or hatches to suggest fluctuating light falling across the façades.

Helen Gerardia was born in Ekaterinoslav, Russia (now Dnipro, Ukraine), and emigrated to the United States. She worked as a public school teacher in New York City before beginning to study art at the Art Students League of New York in 1947. She continued her studies at the Hofmann School with Hans Hofmann, and she also attended the Brooklyn Museum School. Her first solo exhibition was in 1953, and she was an original member of the Vectors, a group of New York artists with strong female representation that was initiated in 1957. Gerardia participated in their exhibitions until 1967. She held offices in many organizations: American Society of Contemporary Artists; National Association of Women Artists; The Society of American Graphic Artists; and Artists Equity of New York. She focused on painting and printmaking, and her style has been described as Geometric Abstraction. Gerardia often referred to urban life when choosing themes, but in the 1960s she was inspired by growing interest in space exploration. Her print, "Moonlight," was selected as the primary advertising image for an exhibition at the Asheville Art Museum in 2021, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Apollo space program.