Helen Hoie

Helen Hoie (1911 - 2000) was an American abstract painter and collagist who lived and worked on the East End in Long Island, New York.

Born Helen Bencker in Leetsdale, Pennsylvania, Hoie attended Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and later studied with Kenneth Shopen at the University of Vermont, Elliot O’Hara in Maine, Henry Pearson in New York, and Alexander Russo in East Hampton. She started her career as a book illustrator for Little, Brown, and Co., in Boston and later served as an assistant to John Wilson, head of the Harvard Architectural Sculpture Department. Hoie would also become a leading fashion designer while working in 1940s and 1950s New York, specializing in lingerie.

Hoie’s practice in collage was intimately connected to her paintings, as they often served as studies for the subsequent larger works. Hoie has said, “In creating my own world of collage from pieces of paper, fabric, or almost any material at hand, I enjoy the translucency of color, the gentle movement of flowing threads, the depths of space that are created as one surface overlaps another. It defines a new, personal universe.”

Hoie lived in East End of Long Island with her husband, the artist Claes Hoie, where they were part of a lively social scene centered around the home of painter Jimmy Ernst and his wife, Dallas Ernst, who regularly entertained the likes of artists including Ibram Lassaw, Willem de Kooning, and Kenzo Okada, who was a friend of Hoie’s. During her career, Hoie won numerous awards, including first prize in abstract painting from the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York (1970) and has shown widely in group exhibitions at institutions including The Brooklyn Museum, The Parrish Art Museum in Southhampton, New York, Guild Hall, and the National Academy of Design. Hoie has also been the subject of several solo exhibitions at the Babcock Gallery in New York (1974, 1977, and 1981) as well as a retrospective exhibition at The Parrish Art Museum in Southhampton, New York, in 1978.