USF Contemporary Art Museum is a 2018 Frankenthaler Prints Initiative Awardee

Wednesday, December 05, 2018

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 Foundation’s extensive collection of prints by the artist.

The gifts—spanning etching, lithography, monotype or monoprint, pochoir, screenprint, woodcut, and other techniques, sometimes in combination—will reflect the variety of media Frankenthaler used.
Each museum will also receive a one‐time grant of $25,000 to develop a project or program for the study, presentation, and interpretation of the works within a three‐year 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 Frankenthaler’s 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 Frankenthaler’s 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 (1928–2011), 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 artist’s estate. The Foundation supports the artist’s legacy through a variety of initiatives, including encouraging and facilitating significant exhibitions of Frankenthaler’s work, grant-making, and the publishing of a catalog raisonné. Its holdings include an extensive selection of Frankenthaler’s 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, USFCAM’s 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 university’s art collection, comprising more than 5000 contemporary artworks.