Helen Hardin “Changing Woman” Aquatint Etching [SOLD]

Among the strongest and most sought-after work by Santa Clara Pueblo artist Helen Hardin is a series of three exceptional aquatint etchings. "Changing Woman," "Medicine Woman," and "Listening Woman" comprise what is commonly referred to as Hardin's "Woman Series." Hardin, the daughter of influential Santa Clara Pueblo artist Pablita Velarde, was primarily known as a painter. In 1979, art dealer Sue Di Maio began encouraging Hardin to explore printmaking. Hardin's contemporaries—Fritz Scholder and R.C. Gorman, most notably—had been creating lithographs successfully for years, but she believed these artists' prints to be inferior to their paintings. She was not excited about the possibility of exploring printmaking.

Hardin begrudgingly attended a meeting with Ricardo Ximenes, master printer and operator of El Cerro Graphics in Los Lunas, New Mexico. After a lengthy meeting regarding technical details and the receipt of a persuasive follow-up letter, Hardin agreed to go to work with Ximenes. She found herself to be well-suited to the medium and, after her earliest efforts were successes, began to enjoy it. She created and released 23 etchings in total, all during the last four years of her life.

"Changing Woman" was the first of the three Woman Series etchings. Jay Scott's Changing Woman: The Life and Art of Helen Hardin provides an excellent description of the significance of the image: ". . . Hardin had achieved a great synthesis, a powerful self-portrait: the artist as young woman and ageless kachina. The geometry that sometimes dominated her work was now utterly subservient to an underlying emotion. But what emotion? ‘Changing Woman' is an ambivalent woman, a woman in dissonant flux, a woman whose internal movements have been externalized by all those irregular, collapsing rectangles . . . The image is not only or even a portrait of a woman, it is a blueprint of identity, and of identity seen as a product of mercurial and perhaps uncontrollable psychic processes forever in transition." Hardin was so pleased with the image that she recreated it as an identically titled painting, before deciding to continue creating the series of etchings.

The etching is signed Tsa-Sah-Wee-Eh and marked A/P, which specifies that this is an artist proof—limited to 6 copies for the personal use of the artist as she wished. It is framed in a thin metal frame, under a fabric matting.

Helen Hardin (1943-1984) Tsa-Sah-Wee-Eh or "Little Standing Spruce" was an innovative and influential painter from Santa Clara Pueblo. Hardin was born in 1943 to Santa Clara Pueblo painter Pablita Velarde and Caucasian civil servant Herbert Hardin. Inspired by her mother, she began creating and selling paintings as a teenager. She went in a different direction than her mother and her mother's peers, creating more contemporary works that depict Native American symbology with striking geometrical patterns and abstract imagery. She died of cancer in 1984, leaving behind an astounding body of work for her many admirers to enjoy.

Condition: excellent condition

Provenance: this Helen Hardin "Changing Woman" Aquatint Etching is from a private collection

Reference and Recommended Reading:  Changing Woman: The Life and Art of Helen Hardin by Jay Scott

TAGS: Helen Hardin, Santa Clara Pueblo, Pablita Velarde, Native American symbols, Native American Paintings, Acoma Pueblo