Helen Farr (1911-2005)

Helen Farr was born in New York City in 1911.  She received her training at the Art Students League, studying under Boardman Robinson and her future husband John Sloan, a celebrated artist of the Ashcan school.  A painter, illustrator, lithographer and art educator, Farr also designed sets and costumes for children’s theater productions.  She wrote and edited a book on Sloan’s teachings and philosophy of art in 1939, and married Sloan, who was nearly 40 years her senior, five years later. Farr served as director of the Society of Independent Artists from 1940-44, and exhibited work in each of its annual exhibitions from 1929 through 1944.  Farr’s work was also shown at the Hudson Guild in New York, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the de Young Museum of Art in San Francisco.  Examples of her work are included in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

References: Falk, Peter Hastings, ed., Who’s Who in American Art (Sound View Press, 1999).

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