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Helen Stoilas

Writer and editor

editor@helenstoilas.com
https://linktr.ee/helenstoilas

( 01 )

Who I am


An editor and arts journalist with more than 20 years of experience delivering meaningful and engaging content across platforms, including print, audio/video reporting and live events. I'm also a dedicated geek, lover of all things weird and whimsical, and proud cat lady. 

What I've been up to lately
When I'm not writing
Where it all started
Just… why??

( 02 )

What I've been up to lately

December 2025, Cultured Magazine

At 82, Howardena Pindell Is Thrilled That Her Work—and Words—Can Still ‘Frighten’

“To young artists, I always say, ‘Do not give up,’” Howardena Pindell told the audience at the American Federation of Arts’s 2025 Gala in November, where she was honored with a Cultural Leadership Award. The lesson is one Pindell learned the hard way, working as a Black woman in a largely white and historically male-dominated art world, facing hostility and racism throughout her career…

November 2025, Artnet News

How Fiber Artist Gary Tyler’s Powerful Quilts Reframe a Life Stolen by Injustice

“This is the story of how I wound up on death row and stayed in that prison for nearly 42 years,” wrote fiber artist Gary Tyler in the prologue to his new memoir, Stitching Freedom, published by Simon and Schuster in October. The book recounts the harrowing experience Tyler went through as a Black teenager living in the recently desegregated South in the early 1970s, when he was falsely convicted in the shooting of a white boy, and Louisiana’s deeply racist court system sent him to the state’s infamous Angola prison…

October 2025, Apollo Magazine

Princeton’s brand-new art museum thinks outside the box

When the Princeton University Art Museum reopens at the end of the month at the heart of a historic campus older than the United States, it will have been five years in the making and even longer in the planning. Its new home, a 13,500-square-metre modernist statement piece designed by Adjaye Associates, unites a collection that spans world cultures and time periods, defined by the interests of generations of alumni and an acquisitions budget beyond the dreams of most universities…

September 2025, The Art Newspaper

Amid layoffs and defunding threats, here's how US arts funding is adapting to life under Trump

Work at the top cultural funding agencies in the United States—the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)—has been quietly picking up, after the administration of US President Donald Trump and its Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) slashed staff and cancelled grant programmes this spring…

July 2025, The Art Newspaper

Amy Sherald cancels Smithsonian show over censorship claim

The artist Amy Sherald has cancelled the final leg of her touring solo exhibition American Sublime, due to open at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, DC, in September, after representatives of the museum allegedly suggested removing a portrait of a non-binary transgender person posing as the Statue of Liberty to avoid falling afoul of US President Donald Trump’s targeting of transgender communities…

July 2025, The Art Newspaper

The magic of Troy Hill—a series of unique whole house art installations in Pittsburgh

In an otherwise unassuming neighbourhood in Pittsburgh, inside what look like average urban homes, a collection of transformational art installations are waiting to be discovered. Step through the door of one of the Troy Hill Art Houses and you will be transported into an artist’s imagined world…

July 2025, The Art Newspaper

US government’s attempts to solicit National Park visitors’ feedback on historical depictions backfires

Do not ask the question if you do not want to hear the answer. The US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum learned that lesson publicly last month, after his effort to solicit feedback from National Parks visitors backfired…

June 2025, Apollo Magazine

The Met’s Rockefeller Wing now stands taller than ever

For many visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in recent years, the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing was a part of the museum that was rushed through, a darkly lit shortcut from the Greek and Roman galleries to the modern and contemporary art wing, the special exhibition galleries and the elevators to the rooftop garden…

May 2025, Apollo Magazine

Storm King Art Center goes for growth

Joni Mitchell must be smiling. As part of its $53-million expansion, opening on 7 May, Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, has planted over not one but two parking lots and turned them into an outdoor art lover’s paradise…

May 2025, The Art Newspaper

The NEA is on Trump’s chopping block again, amid Doge review

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the last major US federal cultural agency still left standing in Washington, DC, has come under the axe of US President Donald Trump once again…

May 2025, The Art Newspaper

‘It’s much more extreme’: US institutions and artists enter a new culture war

The fight over America’s cultural soul has begun. In the few short months since US President Donald Trump took office, swathes of the country’s cultural infrastructure have been dismantled and efforts are being made to reshape what remains as instruments of White House policy. The impact has been swift and shocking to many in the cultural field, raising questions about what the arts will look like under Trump and spurring calls for a co-ordinated resistance…

March 2025, Apollo Magazine

‘I was so absolutely into the villains’ – an interview with Alex Da Corte

Unless you’re a psychotherapist or a family member, you rarely get to rifle through someone’s childhood memories and personal touchstones, but while visiting Alex Da Corte at his North Philadelphia studio, it feels like I am doing just that…

February 2025, The Art Newspaper

'Her work asks us to confront the cycles of oppression and resilience': Octavia E. Butler’s enduring influence on artists

Octavia E. Butler’s writing has never been more relevant. The Pasadena native and MacArthur “genius” award-winning speculative-fiction author foresaw the world we live in today in her books Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998)…

January 2025, The Art Newspaper

Gary Tyler: the quilt artist who speaks up for the unjustly incarcerated

“You never stifle an individual’s ability to be able to try to make a difference,” the artist Gary Tyler says. Of all the difficult truths he learned while incarcerated from the age of 16 for a crime he did not commit, this might be the most ingrained. And it has shaped much of his work since he was finally able to secure his release in 2016, after spending 41 years in prison…

December 2024, The Art Newspaper

KAWS: the former graffiti artist turned global pop art star shows off his collector’s eye

Donnelly is not just a very busy artist, he is also a collector, and a selection of his extensive holdings are now on view at the Drawing Center in New York. The display of 350 works is just a fraction of around 4,000 works, by more than 500 artists, that Donnelly owns—and “that’s definitely a modest calculation”, he says… 

November 2024, Apollo Magazine

A new look for Japanese art at the MFA Boston

There are only a handful of museum spaces that can be truly described as meditative, offering visitors a quiet respite from the hustle of a busy institution, among historically important and aesthetically impressive objects. The Japanese Buddhist Temple Room at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is not only one of the best loved in the United States, it is one of the oldest, built as part of the museum’s original Beaux Arts home on Huntington Avenue, which opened in 1909… 

October 2024, Cultured Magazine

Trailblazing Artist Charles Atlas Has Been Planning His Retrospective for Years. His Efforts Landed Him the Show of a Lifetime

“About Time,” the title of Charles Atlas’s first career retrospective, now on view at the ICA Boston, is both a joke and completely serious. On the one hand, Atlas’s work has always had a temporal focus, capturing the fleeting feeling of viewing live performance, the immediacy of personal interactions, the perma-scroll of TikTok, and the free association of thought. On the other, it is long overdue for a media artist of Atlas’s caliber to finally get the retrospective treatment… 

September 2024, The Art Newspaper

Artists and collectors rush to support Kamala Harris campaign

Agnes Gund, the president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and a high-profile philanthropist who famously sold a Roy Lichtenstein work to fund criminal justice reform, says Harris “represents opportunity, and she represents optimism”…

July 2024, The Art Newspaper

June Clark: the Toronto-based US artist exploring the American flag and its many meanings

June Clark left the US in 1968, the same year anti-war student protesters occupied Columbia University, and riots broke out in major cities including Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, DC, following the assassination of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr…

June 2024, CNN Style

The mysterious New York nanny who helped shape 20th-century street photography

For much of her life, Vivian Maier was something of a mystery. Her photographic talent went largely unrecognized because she kept her work a secret from most of the people who knew her, including the New York and Chicago families she worked for as a live-in nanny and caregiver…

April 2024, CNN Style

Why this pioneering abstract painter disappeared from the art world at the height of her fame

In the latter years of World War II, the New York art scene started coalescing around a group of artists including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, visionaries who would develop a daring new movement known as abstract expressionism. But some years before these artists became known for splashing paint and swinging their brushes wildly across their studios, Janet Sobel was carefully dripping paint onto her canvases in an all too similar manner…

February 2024, The Art Newspaper

‘Shame on those that silence artists’: Shahzia Sikander speaks out after her opening in Texas is cancelled

A celebration and artist talk organised for the opening of a temporary exhibition of work by the Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander at the University of Houston (UH) have been cancelled after an anti-abortion group threatened to protest the events…

October 2023, CNN Style

The ‘compulsive’ power of Sharon Stone’s art

Sharon Stone throws herself into her art. For years, her chosen medium was performance, but since the Academy Award-nominated actor picked up a paintbrush in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, she hasn’t put it down…

August 2023, The New York Times

A Celebrated Architect’s House Needs Rescuing

Deep in the woods of Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, down winding and rutted dirt roads, a summer home built in 1949 by the Modernist architect Marcel Breuer sits perched on stilts…

June 2023, Artnet News

Artists and Writers Have Long Worked Out of Remote Beach Shacks on Cape Cod. Now Residents Are Fighting the National Park Service to Stay

When Henri David Thoreau trekked across the outer dunes of Provincetown in the 1850s, he called the landscape a “desert,” where one was faced by “a tide of sand impelled by waves and wind, slowly flowing from the sea toward the town”…

June 2023, The Art Newspaper

Art advisor Lisa Schiff is cooperating with authorities investigating her business, her lawyer says

Responding for the first time to one of the explosive lawsuits brought against art advisory Lisa Schiff, her lawyer John Cahill has revealed in court filings that Schiff is cooperating with federal and state authorities investigating her business dealings, and has been working to liquidate her advisory firm to pay creditors…

November 2022, The Art Newspaper

‘I like to be confrontational’: artist Roberto Lugo on how propaganda inspires his work

Roberto Lugo’s pottery is born from the streets of North Philadelphia. Influenced by hip-hop culture, graffiti art and Black history, his pots, cups and plates memorialise a lived experience that is not often recognised by traditional institutions…

November 2022, Artnet News

Artist Philippa Pham Hughes’s Latest Work Is a Massive Dinner Party Bringing Conservatives and Liberals Together Ahead of the Midterm Elections

America, it’s time we had a talk. In the lead up to the mid-term elections in the U.S., political discourse has become more polarized than ever. And with the aim of finding some common ground, the artist Philippa Pham Hughes is organzing a dinner this evening at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) in Ann Arbor, where guests from both sides of the political aisle will sit down with each other to hash things out…

September 2022, The Art Newspaper

Second act for lost Jannis Kounellis performance ahead of major show

For his first exhibition in the US, at Sonnabend Gallery in 1972, the Greek-Italian artist Jannis Kounellis (1936-2017) presented several performances. One of them was long thought lost, the materials and instructions for the performance unseen for 50 years…

September 2022, The Art Newspaper

Playing with history: how heritage and archaeology are transforming video games

Ever since Carmen Sandiego swiped her first priceless cultural artefact in 1985—wherever in the world she happened to be—heritage has played a tempting role in video games…

August 2022, The Art Newspaper

Islands that were home to artist Andrew Wyeth become classrooms

A few miles off the coast of central Maine are two tiny islands—known as Allen and Benner—where the artist Andrew Wyeth and his wife Betsy once lived. For decades, the islands were a family retreat, where Andrew occasionally painted and Betsy designed scenic landscapes and restored historic buildings—and friends would come for lobster bakes on the beach…

July 2022, The Art Newspaper

'The goal of every artist is to express what they see': Legally blind painter and Star Trek actor Bruce Horak on abstracting the unseen

The visually impaired artist, who portrays the blind telepathic alien Lieutenant Hemmer in Star Trek’s new streaming series, has been working on a 1,000-piece portrait series over the past decade…

May 2022, The Art Newspaper

Missing Picasso painting resurfaces during Philippines president-elect's celebratory visit with his mother, Imelda Marcos

For those left wondering what the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr as president of the Philippines would mean for the hunt to track down his family’s ill-gotten wealth, the answer seemed clear when the new leader visited his mother Imelda Marcos to celebrate his victory…

May 2022, The Art Newspaper

Nick Cave: ‘Art has always been my saviour’

Nick Cave first came to Chicago in 1990, when he was hired to teach fashion design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a department he would later direct. He has lived and worked in the city since then, developing a body of work that merges costume, performance and social action…

April 2022, The Art Newspaper

When an art forger becomes an artist

Twelve years ago, The Art Newspaper broke a story about a prolific—and somewhat eccentric—art forger, who had been placing his work in the collections of unsuspecting US museums and universities for decades. Sometimes masquerading as a Jesuit priest, and often using a false identity, Mark Landis donated fakes he had skillfully drawn or overpainted himself to regional institutions across the country, passing them off as small but significant works by artists such as Picasso, Daumier and Signac…

September 2021, The Art Newspaper

What do the bells of Notre Dame 'hear'? Artist Bill Fontana listens to the soul of Paris

Two years after a fire destroyed the roof and spire of Notre Dame in Paris, largely silencing the once active cathedral, a contemporary art project could help the historic site regain its voice as part of its reconstruction. The Bay Area artist Bill Fontana is currently working to record the sounds that the medieval church “hears” through its ten monumental bells…

July 2021, The Art Newspaper

Loki’s production designer on the Modernist inspiration behind the show’s stunning visuals

Fans of Modernist design can find a lot to appreciate in Loki, the television series starring Tom Hiddleston recently released by Marvel Studios on the streaming channel Disney+. The stunning production is clearly influenced by Brutalist and Neo-Futurist architecture, as well as Soviet Socialist art and sculpture…

June 2021, The Art Newspaper

‘The biggest mistake of my life’: 49-year-old ‘art freak’ confesses to stealing a Picasso and Mondrian from National Gallery in Athens

The 49-year-old construction worker who allegedly stole works by Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian from the National Gallery in Athens more than nine years ago has been identified by Greek media as a self-described “art freak” named George Sarmantzopoulos. And according to his confession to the Hellenic Police, he did it all because of his obsession with art…

And you can find more here…

( 03 )

When I'm not writing

February 2022

Podcast | 'Leap Into The Void' on the Nerdy Photographer

“Leap Into the Void” by Yves Klein from October of 1960. The story behind this artwork and the accompanying photographs is equal parts baffling, hilarious, and inspiring…

February 2021

Podcast | 'Black grief and white grievance' at New York’s New Museum

The curator Naomi Beckwith and artist Okwui Okpokwasili discuss Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (until 6 June), a major show at the New Museum in New York—and the final project conceived by the late curator Okwui Enwezor…

July 2020

Talk | Leonardo da Vinci at the Hermitage and the Louvre

A conversation with Zoya Kuptsova, curator of Italian painting from the 13th-16th centuries at the State Hermitage Museum and Vincent Delieuvin, chief curator of Italian 16th-century paintings at the Louvre, organised by the National Arts Club in New York…

January 2021 

Video | Donald Trump’s presidency as the art world saw it

A recap of Trump's term in office, through artists' work and news photos taken from The Art Newspaper's coverage…

( 04 )

Where it all started

2017 - October 2021

Editor, Americas, The Art Newspaper, New York 

Oversaw editorial strategy for North and South America, commissioning and editing news, comment, reviews and features on subjects across the visual arts, interpreting world events through a cultural lens. 

  • Managed a team of staff writers and section editors.

  • Forged and maintained a network of international freelance writers.

  • Cultivated relationships with arts industry leaders for commentary on significant issues in the art world.


2016-2017

Deputy Editor, US, The Art Newspaper, New York 

Worked with Editor-in-Chief to commission artist-focused news and features.   

2008-2016

Editorial Manager and Web Editor, The Art Newspaper, New York 

As the publication’s first dedicated web editor, I expanded the breaking news service and produced digital-first content and media, and optimized print stories for web readership. 

  • Coordinated a major redesign and relaunch of news website, liaised with developers on editorial needs, tested functionality of bespoke CMS and steered public release.

  • Recruited and mentored New York editorial staff and regular correspondents in Los Angeles, Chicago, Canada and South America.

  • Co-produced special regional reports on Los Angeles, Chicago.

  • Steered daily reporting of the high-profile Knoedler art fraud trial, coordinating with embedded legal correspondent, and secured interview with embattled gallery director.

2006-2008

Staff writer, The Art Newspaper, London

Investigated and reported on international art news, pitched original story ideas based on independent research and delivered assignments on deadline.

  • Broke stories on political performances by the Danish artist group Parallel Action in Guantanamo Bay and Iran, and the launch of Pakistan’s first contemporary art museum

  • Produced feature-length reports on political contributions by leading collectors and arts professionals, as well as trends in institutional acquisitions and exhibitions.


Find my full CV here…

( 05)

Just… why??

If you can explain to me what this taxidermist was thinking, I'd love to hear it…

© 2021 Helen Stoilas
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