Bruce Helander
Collage Artist
1947 - Present
Inducted in 2014
Biography
Bruce Helander had an interest in art as a child, and developed an intense fascination with paper collage at the age of fourteen. In high school he was designing stage sets and show posters, and received his first public commission for the Rochester (Minnesota) Airport at the age of sixteen.
He was accepted into the highly prestigious and competitive Rhode Island School of Design, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in illustration and a master’s in painting. Seven years later he became Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the college. He is a former White House Fellow for the National Endowment of the Arts and published his first national magazine, Art Express, at the age of 32. He established residence in Palm Beach, Florida in 1982, and operated a celebrated art gallery on Worth Avenue for thirteen years before becoming a full-time artist and art critic. His work is in more than fifty permanent museum collections, including the Guggenheim, Whitney and Metropolitan. Helander has had several survey exhibitions in Florida at the Norton Museum of Art, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Coral Springs Museum of Art and the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale. He has produced fabric designs for Nicole Miller, numerous illustrations for The New Yorker magazine, many posters for film festivals, charities, corporations and private and non-profit institutions. Helander has written a best-selling book, Learning to See, which was an Indie Awards Finalist. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Art Economist and continues to be a regular contributor to the Arts & Culture section of The Huffington Post. He was named as one of the Palm Beach 20 Local Legends by Palm Beach Illustrated and exhibits his work extensively, with upcoming shows in Wellington (Florida), Williamsport (Pennsylvania), Toronto (Canada), Moscow and St. Petersburg (Russia), and Los Angeles.
