Helen worked in many different art disciplines including theatre scene and costume design, painting, computer animation and video documentary.
Shirley Kaufer was shown in Los Angeles at the juried Women's Film Festival at Barnsdall Park and on local PBS stations.
Her corporate clients included Hachette Filapecci Publications, The Getty Center, CBS, Penguin, Doubleday and the Mayor's Office, City of Los Angeles.
One of Helen's last commercial assignments was to appear on the other side of the camera for the Travel Channel in the 30-minute photo travelogue, Freeze Frame San Diego.
She is represented in Los Angeles by DNJ Gallery, in New York by Marla Hamburg Kennedy, and in Boston by Tepper Takayama Fine Arts.
The MINARC designed installation using 25 photo screens telling the stories simultaneously was critically acclaimed and invited to re-install at the international Los Angeles Art Show, in January, 2010.
[2] A multimedia piece including projected images, text extracted from pulp fiction and mid twentieth-century jazz along with 20 of Helen's photographic prints was exhibited at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University at New Paltz, NY, October 2007.
John performed the piece live for the first time in a multi-media presentation of Urban Noir/LA-NY after Helen lectured at the Annenberg Space for Photography in June 2009.
- A second version of A Night View of Los Angeles, also 40 feet (12 m) long, but printed with solvent ink on outdoor banner vinyl was exhibited at the front entrance of the international fair, Photo LA, Santa Monica, CA in January, 2007.
- - - Helen's vision was to then invite the most significant Los Angeles graffiti writers of the past twenty years to share her privileged view of the city and catch (paint) her 40 ft (12 m).
Helen K. Garber, a noirist, feels a camaraderie with graffiti writers as she and they roam the city after dark while sometimes forsaking their physical safety, to use the urban landscape to create their art.
Duce One designed the collaboration and invited Mear, Saber, Gin, Retna, Gzer, Vyal, Revok, Zes, and Cab to join him.
Imagine how more beautiful our cities can be if art programs were re-introduced to the public school system with an added emphasis on the appreciation of the urban landscape.
Premiered at DNJ Gallery, Los Angeles, in 2010, Venice/Venezia is a series of black and white diptychs on stretched canvas that create a metaphor by illustrating the duality of life in two distant cities that share the same name.