Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand|Primary Sources

The Next Great Graphic Designer

Tonight on Bravo's "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist" the winning Penguin book cover design will be unveiled, which begs a few questions. We hope our readers will weigh in with their opinions.

Jessica Helfand|Reviews

Rome’s MAXXI: Force Field as Field Space

The MAXXI center in Rome opens with a glorious, international exhibition and showcases a building that is likely to be as controversial — and as celebrated — as its designer.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Every Poem an Epitaph: The Protestant Cemetery in Rome

One does not have to be a poet to write heartbreaking words on a piece of eternal stone. Or perhaps the opposite is true, that all such memorials are lyrical remembrances — that every poem, as TS Eliot once observed, is …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Prisoners of Logic

For five or six years now, I have led a double life as a painter. Until recently, I viewed this other identity as a kind of dirty secret.

Jessica Helfand|Report

Better Living Through Artistry

SEWA, a cooperative textile manufacturing company in Ahmedebad, India, is a network of self-employed women.

Observed|Photos

The Russian Empire, Before Photoshop

What happens when you enhance the color saturation and shift the entire time continuum?

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Ezra Winter Project: Chapter Six

In the Spring of 1926, publisher George Palmer Putnam organized an 8,500 mile expedition to Greenland in quest of specimens for the then-new Hall of Ocean Life in the American Museum of Natural History: the ship’s roster included an …

Jessica Helfand|Projects

Ezra Winter Project: Chapter Seven

As the gulf widens between the aspirational and the real — between the projected self and the authentic self — Ezra Winter immerses himself in all that is beautiful and lyrical and dream-like, including and especially the …

Jessica Helfand|Projects

Ezra Winter Project: Chapter Ten

In April, 1933, Ezra Winter delivers a fifteen-minute live radio talk on the subject of mural painting in relation to modern life, in which he tries desperately to convince himself that he has embraced the modern world.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Ezra Winter Project: Chapter Eleven

The 1930s would prove to be an enormously fertile period in Ezra Winter’s life: following the success of the Radio City murals, the artist embarked on major commissions for the United States Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

A Day for Fathers

As a child, I was always perplexed by Father's Day and Mother’s Day. Why, I wondered, wasn’t there a Children’s Day?

Jessica Helfand|Books

La Grafica

Typography is, of course, her lingua franca:  and who better than to write this book than Louise Fili?