Best known for abstract paintings using her signature “soak-stain” technique, Helen Frankenthaler brought a similar sensibility, what she described as “a pouring, flooding, spilling, bleeding one,” to works on paper. This talk will focus on the exhibition Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper (on view this fall at The Block, Northwestern University through December 14). Curated by Stephanie S.E. Lee, Graduate Fellow, and Corinne Granof, Academic Curator, the exhibition brings together over 30 lithographs and etchings by Frankenthaler and the work of artists who use similar strategies—allowing ink or paint to sit, spread, and pool on surfaces or giving up control of the artistic process in other ways. The exhibition highlights works from a 2023 gift from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and brings together works by Frankenthaler’s friends and colleagues—Robert Motherwell, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell, and artists who over the past sixty years have invited accident, change, and the unpredictable into their practice.
Corinne Granof is Academic Curator at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, where she directs the museum’s curatorial initiatives involving student and faculty collaboration. Working with students and faculty, Granof has curated, co-curated, and collaborated on such exhibitions as Dissident Sisters: Bev Grant and Feminist Activision (2024); For One and All: Prints from the Block’s Collection (2023), William Blake and the Age of Aquarius (2017), and A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s‒1980s (2016), and The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz (2002) and edited related companion publications. Granof attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an undergraduate and has a PhD in art history from the University of Chicago.