BIO:

Helen Hawkins (b. New Orleans, 1997) lives and works in Brooklyn New York. Her background and medium of choice is oil paint, but her works span a variety of mediums. Hawkins’ training as an artist started in high school, before moving to New York to study at the Gallatin School within NYU. While studying at NYU she has kept up her own practice, balancing school and art and letting one influence the other. She graduates with a degree in her self-designed major, the Politics of Art, in May 2020.

Artist Statement:

I make art about issues which aggravate me. Why do we follow the way certain things are? Sometimes we do so blindly, other times were know the proper information, yet manage to fail to follow our moral compass. What does it mean for our social structure to be built in a certain way and what are its effects? I try to make images to tell stories which I feel navigate important issues. These images, often sourced from historical photographs and reimagined on photoshop, intersect questions with physical reality.

In Safari Boys I put two American suburban white boys with water guns on an African Safari with another tourist who paid to shoot one of the most beautiful creatures on the earth, a zebra. Growing up in the south, where hunting to many people is more than just a hobby, I always found myself on the other side questioning, why? This sort of questioning is what inspires my work. I made 79 cent bill, an oversized sculpture of a dollar bill, to loudly represent the gender pay gap. Of course data on the gender pay gap is widely available, yet why are women still paid less than men? The Internment Camp Children, imagines a different life for the children and families who were interned during World War II. What if instead of a camp these children were given their own slice of the american dream, a jungle gym in suburbia? I was brought here as a reaction to ICE and the thousands of families whose lives have been uprooted. Instead of showing the same images of these camps which fill news sources it felt more effective to show a moment in history Americans are not proud of, yet similar to the current moment, to help take a step back and re-evaluate what is considered acceptable.