Long underrecognized for her innovations, a trailblazer of the Light and Space Movement is suddenly juggling three tribute shows to her six-decade career.
SANTA FE, N.M. — Helen Pashgian, the pioneering but long underrecognized California Light and Space artist, recently took a break from installing her full-on retrospective here at SITE Santa Fe to recount one of the defining moments of her life, how around age 3 she had accompanied her family from their comfortable lodgings in Pasadena to their summer shack in a secluded cove north of Laguna Beach. She’d regularly caper down to the shallow tide pools below, when one day, she suddenly noticed the way that light shimmered off the windswept surface of the water, and then, less than a foot beneath that, the way that same light shimmered in a completely different manner off the scalloped sand.
“Now granted,” she explained, “my little 3-year-old brain couldn’t really make out what was going on, but I was completely captivated by the play of that light.” She paused before sighing expansively: “And I remember it as if it were yesterday.”
It was not yesterday.
In fact, it was almost 85 years ago, and in the meantime that light-besotted toddler grew into a lanky light-besotted teenage tomboy (swimming team, surfer, intrepid explorer of the mountain slopes just beyond the family’s Altadena manse) and then a light-besotted academic, specializing in art history (specifically Vermeer and Rembrandt and the light-besotted artists of the Dutch Golden Age). Moving through Pomona College to graduate work at Columbia and Boston College to the brink of a Ph.D. push at Harvard, she instead demurred. In another pivotal moment, she woke bolt upright one night to the twin realizations that she had to return “to the eucalyptus scent and, of course, the diaphanous light, of Southern California,” and to find some tangible way, she wasn’t yet sure how, though definitely not academically, of engaging with that actual light.