This fall, The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University presents Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper, on view September 17–December 14, 2025. The exhibition explores how artists have used printmaking—and works on paper more broadly—as a site for experimentation, improvisation, and aesthetic risk.

The exhibition centers on the pioneering print practice of Helen Frankenthaler(American, 1928–2011). Known for her signature “soak-stain” technique in painting, Frankenthaler brought a similar sensibility to printmaking, embracing fluidity, chance, and the variable interaction of materials in her works on paper. Her lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts reflect a dynamic, process-oriented approach—what she has described as “pouring, flooding, spilling, bleeding.”

The presentation marks the debut of a recent gift of 34 works from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, part of the Frankenthaler Prints Initiative. In 2023, The Block was one of ten university art museums nationally to receive a portfolio of Frankenthaler’s prints and working proofs, along with funding to support interpretation and public engagement. 

Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding places this new acquisition in dialogue with over 30 works from The Block’s permanent collection, highlighting artists who have similarly challenged the boundaries of control and gesture in their artwork. Prints, drawings, and watercolors by artists of Frankenthaler’s close circle, including Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, and David Smith, provide a broader context for Frankenthaler’s contributions to postwar abstraction and printmaking. The conversation expands beyond the historical frame of Frankenthaler’s contemporaries, bringing in artists who have since drawn inspiration from Frankenthaler’s approach—Lynda Benglis and Amy Sillman—as well as artists who have welcomed chance and the unexpected in their artistic practice, such as John Cage, Max Gimblett, and Frankenthaler’s studio assistant Kikuo Saito.

Curated by Stephanie S.E. Lee, 2024–25 Block Museum Graduate Fellow in Art History, and Corinne Granof, Academic Curator, the exhibition draws from in-depth research, including time spent in the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation archives. There, the curators uncovered visual and textual documentation of Frankenthaler’s collaborative print process, insights that shape the presentation of Divertimento (1983), shown alongside a full suite of working proofs. "In many ways, these working proofs show what the editioned print cannot: they are traces of decision-making, experimentation, and artistic dialogue between Frankenthaler, her circle, and the print workshop. That is what we wanted to bring to life in the exhibition," said Stephanie S.E. Lee.