Helena Hernmarck

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Helena Hernmarck (born 1941 in Stockholm) is a Swedish tapestry artist who now lives and works in the United States. She is best known for large tapestries designed for buildings and other architectural settings.

Her family includes her father, Carl Hernmarck, a curator at the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts, and her mother, Kerstin Simon, a journalist. Her uncle, the architect Sven Markelius, helped write the modernist manifesto Acceptera in 1931. Hernmarck studied weaving in Stockholm, first with the Swedish Association of Friends of the Textile Arts and later at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. Her primary teacher was Edna Martin, and she also learned from textile designer Alice Lund. She lived in Canada (1964–1972) and England (1972–1975 before moving to New York in 1975. She married industrial designer Niels Diffrient in 1976.

Hernmarck showed at the Lausanne Biennales in 1965, 1967, and 1969, had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973, and another at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974. She received the American Institute of Architects Craftsmanship Medal in 1973. In the late 1960s she began creating monumental tapestries for corporate settings, working with architects such as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei and Partners, SOM, George Nelson, Ulrich Franzen, Hugh Stubbins, John Carl Warnecke, and Kevin Roche. One early commission was for the Weyerhaeuser Company in Seattle (1970–71) and a later one for the Time Warner Center in New York.

Her 1999 retrospective at the Fashion Institute of Technology, “Monumental and Intimate,” traveled to Waldemarsudde in Stockholm. She participated in the “Sourcing the Museum” show at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., in 2012, and in 2018 the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presented “Weaving in Progress,” which included her weaving studio.

Hernmarck’s work is in major museum collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She was among the first tapestry artists to base designs on photographs, creating photorealistic effects through optical illusions. Her 1960s work reflected pop culture influence, with pieces like Newspapers (1968) made from newspaper clippings and Little Richard (1969), a large piece resembling an album cover. In the 1970s she began using enlarged color photographs, as seen in Sailing (1976) made for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Her 1990 Urn for Peachtree Tower in Atlanta replicates elements of the surrounding architecture. She also uses paper collages, watercolors, and photographic detail in her designs. Her technique relies on texture, color, and value contrast to define line rather than sharp edges. Before major commissions, she works with Wålstedts mill in Dala-Floda, Sweden to spin and dye yarn. Some tapestries are woven with assistants at her Connecticut studio, while others are subcontracted to Alice Lund’s Textile Studio in Dalarna, Sweden.