The Confounding Lightness of Helen Pashgian
The New York Times
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.
