Patrice Aphrodite Helmar is an artist who was born in Juneau, AK. They worked in their father's small-town camera shop and darkroom growing up and they continue to work in photography. Helmar's multidisciplinary work is concerned with issues of labor, class, queerness, and the politics of representation. Their photography is engaged in the poetics of lived experience and everyday life. Helmar's prints were included in a solo exhibition at ESWC in Vermont and are being acquired by the Anchorage Museum.
Helmar's work has been shown at PARTICIPANT INC, the Jewish Museum, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Gaa Gallery, the National Museum of Iceland, and other spaces. They received an M.A.T. from the University of Southeast Alaska in 2013, an M.F.A. in Visual Art from Columbia University in 2015, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022. Helmar is a Lecturer on Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and Columbia University's Visual Arts M.F.A. program. They live and work in Juneau and New York.
At MacDowell, Helmar worked in the Nef Studio’s darkroom on gelatin silver prints to be shown in future exhibitions and edited and made work prints for a first monograph.
