USF Contemporary Art Museum is a 2018 Frankenthaler Prints Initiative Awardee
Wednesday, December 05, 2018

Helen Frankenthaler, Untitled, 1967, screenprint, 25 3/4 x 17 7/8 inches (65.4 x 45.4 cm). Photo credit: Steven Sloman
The USF Contemporary Art Museum, part of the Institute for Research in Art at the
USF College of The Arts, is an awardee of prints by American artist Helen Frankenthaler
as part of a Helen Frankenthaler Foundation initiative to support university museums
in their educational programming.
The Contemporary Art Museum is one of ten university museums nationwide that will
receive ten prints and five to ten related trial proofs, drawn from the Foundations
extensive collection of prints by the artist.
The giftsspanning etching, lithography, monotype or monoprint, pochoir, screenprint,
woodcut, and other techniques, sometimes in combinationwill reflect the variety of
media Frankenthaler used.
Each museum will also receive a onetime grant of $25,000 to develop a project or
program for the study, presentation, and interpretation of the works within a threeyear
timeframe.
Ruth Fine, former Curator of Special Projects in Modern Art at the National Gallery
of Art in Washington, D.C., and a leading authority on Frankenthalers prints, has
selected the prints and is working with the Foundation as an advisor on the multi-year
initiative.
The museums have been selected for their dedicated commitment to prints as a significant
collecting area and teaching tool while having few or no examples of Frankenthalers
prints in their collections.
Other Frankenthaler Prints Initiative Awardees include:
Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin
Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts/Hammer Museum, UCLA
The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Princeton University Art Museum
RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design
SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah College of Art and Design
Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence
Helen Frankenthaler (19282011), whose career spanned six decades, has long been recognized as one of
the great American artists of the twentieth century, widely credited for her pivotal
role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. She produced
a body of work whose impact on contemporary art has been profound and continues to
grow. Her work is represented in the collections of major museums worldwide and has
been the subject of numerous national and international exhibitions and substantial
publications.
The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation was established and endowed by the artist during her lifetime and became active in
2013, on the closing of the artists estate. The Foundation supports the artists
legacy through a variety of initiatives, including encouraging and facilitating significant
exhibitions of Frankenthalers work, grant-making, and the publishing of a catalog
raisonn矇. Its holdings include an extensive selection of Frankenthalers work in a
variety of mediums, her collection of works by other artists, and original papers
and materials pertaining to her life and work.
USF Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) organizes and presents significant and investigative exhibitions of contemporary
art from Florida, the United States and around the world. Serving as a teaching laboratory,
USFCAMs curatorial and socially engaged initiatives and educational programs are
designed to present the students, faculty, and community with current issues of contemporary
art practice, and to explore the role of the arts in society. USFCAM publishes relevant
catalogs, presents critically recognized traveling exhibitions and commissions new
projects by national and international artists. USFCAM maintains the universitys
art collection, comprising more than 5000 contemporary artworks.