As one of America’s most acclaimed 20th-century artists, Helen Frankenthaler H’85 (1928-2011) created an enduring legacy in abstraction and played an instrumental role in the development of color field painting. A tireless experimentalist, Frankenthaler worked in a variety of media beyond the canvas. In a 1993 public conversation, Frankenthaler’s approach to printmaking was described as “What if I try this? What if I try that?”
The Syracuse University Art Museum brings that description to life in its new exhibition “What If I Try This?”: Helen Frankenthaler in the 20th-Century Print Ecosystem, which explores the artist’s printmaking and collaborations with a community of printers over a nearly 50-year span. “In that phrase, we see Frankenthaler’s approach to printmaking, which is based in experimentation,” says Art Museum Curator Melissa Yuen, who organized the exhibition. “But it’s also important to know that printmaking is, in a way, fundamentally at odds with her painting practice, which is very dynamic, spontaneous, fluid. Printmaking is the antithesis of that—it’s meticulous and process oriented.”
Syracuse University Art Museum Curator Melissa Yuen (right) discusses a proof of Helen Frankenthaler’s Nepenthe (1972) with students in the Print Curatorship course.
The exhibition opened Aug. 26 and runs through Dec. 9, with an opening celebration on Sept. 11. One highlight of the celebration is a talk by Stanford University professor and art historian Alexander Nemerov, author of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (Penguin Press, 2021).
Art Museum Director Emily Dittman G’06 (center) introduces students in her Collections Management course to Helen Frankenthaler prints. The prints were awarded to the museum as a gift from the Frankenthaler Foundation.
The exhibition features 56 works—prints, paintings, photographs and letters—by Frankenthaler and her contemporaries, including 11 prints and one set of process proofs gifted to the Syracuse University Art Museum in 2023 by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Among the pieces, Yuen borrowed 24 works from national and area collections and drew on Frankenthaler’s correspondence with artist Grace Hartigan, whose papers are held in the University’s Special Collections Research Center.
“We are thrilled to share this exhibition and related programming with our students, faculty and the broader community,” says Art Museum Director Emily Dittman G’06. “Our museum’s inclusion in the second cohort of the Frankenthaler Prints Initiative creates new opportunities for teaching, research and public engagement.”
Capitalizing on a Synergistic Initiative
In his Print Curatorship course, museum studies professor Andrew Saluti ’99, G’09 talks with students about the variety of printing techniques that Helen Frankenthaler used.
Dittman and Andrew Saluti ’99, G’09, associate professor and coordinator of the museum studies program, first contacted the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in 2018 with interest in participating in its newly announced prints initiative. In 2022, the Art Museum was one of 10 university-affiliated museums awarded prints and a $25,000 grant to carry out its plans for an exhibition with accompanying programs and studies. “I’m proud that our museum, art collection and academic collaborations have been recognized at the level of our colleague institutions,” Saluti says. “It’s a huge honor.”
The initiative further strengthens the museum’s collaboration with academic courses, scholarly research and its audiences. “I hope whoever comes to the show leaves with a new appreciation for both Frankenthaler and her circle and also a better understanding of printmaking and print workshops,” Dittman says.
Creating Hands-on Learning Experiences
Students in the Collections Management course review the condition, dimensions and other details of the Frankenthaler prints.
Since 2024, the Frankenthaler project has been incorporated into three museum studies courses, giving students the opportunity to work with and learn about Frankenthaler’s prints, experience how an exhibition is created and contribute to its development. In the course Collections Management, Dittman introduced students to preservation and conservatorship issues, including the process for receiving, documenting and cataloging information about the prints.
In Saluti’s Print Curatorship class, students examined the prints as a body of work, did curatorial research and created proposals for potential loans for the exhibition from institutions like the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University and the Munson Museum of Art. The students also wrote descriptions of the various printing processes that Frankenthaler used. “The amount of access that Emily, Melissa and the Art Museum have given our program has been invaluable to the students,” Saluti says. “We’ve been able to share the process and illustrate how a major national exhibition comes together.”
Assistant Registrar Abby Campanaro and Preparator Dylan Otts get ready to hang prints for the Frankenthaler exhibition.
Museum studies adjunct professor Derrick Pratt G’21 provides feedback to students in his Public Learning in Museums course during presentations of their educational guides.
In the course Public Learning in Museums, adjunct professor Derrick Pratt G’21 tasked students with creating educational guides that served as references and inspiration for the published guide the museum will use to accompany the exhibition. “My goal was to have the students think about how to engage visitors with an exhibit in an educational way and to have them really consider how you engage children, which is one of the largest audiences we create programs for as museum educators,” he says.
Museum studies program alumna Mary Cooper G’25 was a student in all three classes. Not only did she learn about Frankenthaler’s life, career and artwork, but she also gained knowledge about the traditional methods of printmaking as well as how “Frankenthaler experimented with her mediums and tweaked these complicated techniques to fit her artistic visions,” she says.
Museum studies graduate student Chiagoziem B. Offor G’25 (right) and art history major Kyle Henry ’26 examine a Frankenthaler print in their Collections Management course.
Cooper applied the skills she developed in her Collections Management class to cataloging worksheets for a few of the prints and accessioning them into the museum’s collection. “It was fascinating to play all these different roles and approach the same works from so many professional perspectives,” she says. “Between the proper procedures and best practices of cataloging and accessioning, the nuances and wordsmithing of curatorial writing and the accessibility and audience engagement of museum education, I learned a lot through my wealth of hands-on experience with the project.”
Museum studies graduate student Chiagoziem B. Offor G’25 credits the Collections Management course for his new appreciation for Frankenthaler as an artist and innovator. “What I found most rewarding was getting a real sense of how Frankenthaler worked not just as an artist, but as someone constantly experimenting and collaborating to push the limits of printmaking,” he says. “Seeing her prints up close helped me understand the risks she took and how intentional her choices were.”
Connecting With Syracuse
Students explore Frankenthaler’s prints at the What If I Try This? exhibition during Welcome Week.
Along with being awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree in 1985, Frankenthaler had other ties to Syracuse University. Early in her career, she had a personal relationship with renowned art critic Clement Greenberg ’30, who championed the abstract expressionism movement and introduced her to abstract artist Jackson Pollock. Greenberg also gave the University art collection its sole Frankenthaler painting, which is part of the exhibition.
Ceramics professor Margie Hughto (left) and Helen Frankenthaler discuss the firing of Frankenthaler’s sculptures at the University’s studio in the Continental Can building in 1975. Courtesy of Margie Hughto.
In 1975, ceramics professor Margie Hughto invited Frankenthaler to Syracuse to participate in the New Works in Clay workshop, a collaboration between the University’s School of Art and the Everson Museum that welcomed established artists to try their hand at clay and featured their works in an exhibition. “She was a very confident artist and didn’t have any trouble making anything,” Hughto says. “She had a vision and seemed to work very intuitively.”
When Hughto told Frankenthaler she had to cut up one of her large pieces because it would be too heavy to lift and too big for the kiln, Frankenthaler wasted little time. She asked what size would work, took out a knife and sliced the piece into four sections. As Hughto recalls, “I told her, ‘Helen, it was really beautiful to watch you work today, and you made it all look so easy,’ and she said, ‘Oh, Margie,’ then she looked at me, held out her hand and said, ‘It’s all in the wrist.’”
No matter the medium, Frankenthaler’s confidence, vision and techniques carried her to success and reflected her willingness to experiment. “Some of the printers who worked with Frankenthaler shared their recollections with me about their experiences with her—giving that additional dimension to this personal relationship,” Yuen says. “Frankenthaler had these very individual, close relationships with these printmakers, but she also was very clear in terms of her vision and her artistic identity.”
