Boehm, Helen F. (b. early 1920s)

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Boehm, Helen F. (b. early 1920s)

American porcelain studio owner. Born Helen Francesca Franzolin in early 1920s in Brooklyn, NY; dau. of working-class Italian immigrants; m. Edward Marshall Boehm (1913–1969, porcelain artist), 1944.

With husband, moved to Trenton, New Jersey (1950), where they opened a small studio in a basement; became chair of the Boehm porcelain studios after his death (1969); heavily involved with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for which the Helen F. Boehm Museum in Alexandria, VA, was dedicated (2002). Boehm porcelain, which is shown in more than 130 leading museums and institutions around the world, has been requested by 9 US presidents as gifts for heads of state; the Gregorian Etruscan Museum at the Vatican Museum was dedicated to Edward Boehm (June 19, 1992), the 1st time in half a century that a museum at the Vatican had been dedicated to someone other than a pope, nobility or royalty.