Artist, educator driven by empowerment

To borrow the imagery of a self-portrait of hers, Helen Klebesadel juggles many pursuits. She is, all at once, a feminist artist whose paintings are noted for their technical skill and complex symbolic resonance; an author of publications at the intersection of women’s studies and art theory; a teacher of fine art lauded for helping students develop as people as well as artists; an administrator known to bring an infusion of equanimity, dedication and constructive style to organizations in which she is a leader; and an engaged individual in her community. This is enough to fill many lifetimes; how is all this going on under one roof?

Those who know her say she is “driven by empowerment” of herself and others, she seems to have “no ego,” she makes “a profound impact on people’s lives” or, just as often, “Helen has made a profound impact on my life.”

Even as Klebesadel has kept up her own artistic production and continues to teach art classes, at her current halftime appointment as director of the UW System Women’s Studies Consortium, she has been noted for her positive impact on the ethos of the organization, enhancing the sense of collaboration among members and reducing the focus on competition for scarce resources.

As a teacher, Klebesadel’s positive impact is no less substantial. Mary Kay Neumann is a feminist psychotherapist and a working artist in Madison, and she echoes the sentiments of many in giving Klebesadel credit for spurring her to productivity and success as a painter. Neumann’s previous experience with art workshops had not gone well, but she recalls the first workshop she took with Klebesadel as a pivotal point in her artistic development. “It was partly because she encouraged me so much, but not in a frou-frou way, ‘Oh, you’re so wonderful.’ She was really helpful with what was working, what wasn’t working, how to take it from here, how to start over. I don’t know how I would be where I am without Helen, and the thing is, I think this is true of a lot of people. She has helped an enormous number of people as a teacher.”

Reflecting on Klebesadel’s range of pursuits, Nancy Worcester, a professor of gender and women’s studies who has long known Klebesadel, says, “It all fits together, as who she is. And that’s also her strength with other individuals, she gets people together and gets them working together.” To see how it all fits together, it helps to know where Klebesadel comes from. “I’m rural,” Klebesadel says. “I come from a farm, and I was surrounded by lace makers and gardeners and quilters, who were artists but were not called artists. They were just doing work for everyday use. The early feminist movement did a very good critique of the class structure and art, and that got me, that made total sense to me because my dad’s a fine woodworker, and my grandmothers were very fine artists and gardeners.”

Klebesadel got a scholarship to the Layton School of Art and Design in Milwaukee in the early 1970s but found the environment stifling. Women were well-represented among the students in art programs at the time, ahead of most other fields in that regard, but the faculty was uniformly white and male, as was every artist taught in the curriculum. It did not help that the norms of what was “art” ran counter to what she’d known since childhood. Reflecting now on the situation, Klebesadel says, “I didn’t see how I could become a woman artist because I was given the impression that there weren’t any.”

Issues of gender and cultural equality had not exactly resolved themselves by the 1980s, but the process of redressing issues had begun, and it was already easier to imagine being an artist or professor without being white and male. Klebesadel returned to school at UW–Madison in studio art and gender and women’s studies. After finishing her undergraduate work, she entered the MFA program, and her relationship with the gender and women’s studies program continued, as Klebesadel was hired as a teaching assistant for the course Women and Their Bodies in Health and Disease.

The combination of women’s studies and art has proven dynamite for Klebesadel’s development as an artist and teacher; she has long considered her art to be her women’s studies research. “Women’s studies articulated and validated things for me, the kinds of things I was already drawn to, and they did it by showing me critics and theorists that articulated the politics of the personal that I experience and allowed me to continue to do my work and have a theoretical position from which I was doing my work that I could argue,” she says.

“What that meant was that it made me a teacher and an artist who was devoted to not only my representing the world that I lived in and taking apart everything I’d been taught and looking at it again to decide what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to let go of, but it became a political act to me to think about who was being taught and how people, what artists in the world, what communities in the world had their artists validated enough to be put in our institutions and be taught about and be shown.”

Klebesadel’s success as a student and teacher during her time at Madison was a pattern of things to come. After earning her MFA, Klebesadel became an art professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, achieving tenure a few years later. Her artistic productivity took off, and it was during this time she gained a reputation as a great teacher of artistic technique and the creative process.

Klebesadel also took administrative positions, serving as the national president of the Women’s Caucus for Art. Among her accomplishments at this post was her effort to lead a delegation of 100 artists from the United States, Mexico and Canada to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

Subsequent to her time with the Women’s Caucus for Art, in 2000 Klebesadel left her job at Lawrence to become the director of the UW System Women’s Studies Consortium. Taking the job brought her back to Madison full time, as she had already been living in the city part time while teaching at Lawrence. From 2001–2004, Klebesadel also served as associate chair of gender and women’s studies, where she worked to incorporate more art and art theory into the curriculum.

This track record of administrative leadership and artistic success brought Klebesadel to the attention of Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton, who chairs the Wisconsin Arts Board and sought Klebesadel to join. Lawton describes the board’s efforts as “intense and extensive work,” and she credits Klebesadel, the only member who is a practicing visual artist, for the “very sharp focus” she brings to the work, adding, “She’s very even-keeled. There is this serenity to Helen that just infects the room, it’s a pleasure to have her working, she’s like oil to machinery. There’s no ego getting in the way, she’s a great collaborative worker.”

It is easy to see how Klebesadel could exhibit so much dedication to the board. As with her art and teaching and continuing production in feminist art theory, the work is another way to encourage continue what she describes as “a whole revolution has happened to reflect all the knowledge of our culture.” It is a development that Klebesadel has benefited from greatly, and it is a shift she continues to contribute to greatly, too.

More on Klebesadel can be found at Helen R. Klebesadel.