The Grey Art Museum at New York University is organizing an exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler prints, supported in part by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation’s generous gifts through the Frankenthaler Prints Initiative. Making Music: Helen Frankenthaler Prints from the New York University Art Collection will explore Frankenthaler’s engagement with music and dance across her printmaking practice. The exhibition will bring together a focused selection of prints from the NYU Art Collection to shed light on the artist’s career-long interest in the performing arts and the ways that these cultural forms intersect with her work. To date, there has not been sustained investigation into this relationship, despite the attention that the topic of abstraction and the performing arts has received in the postwar period and the frequency with which allusions to music and dance appear in Frankenthaler’s artwork titles. Frankenthaler’s production of commissioned prints for music and performing arts institutions—two of which are in the Collection—and her costume and set designs for ballet have likewise been underappreciated by scholars and curators. By foregrounding this interdisciplinary dialogue, the project seeks to open new avenues of interpretation within Frankenthaler scholarship and to situate her printmaking within a wider cultural and aesthetic framework.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated museum brochure with an essay by the co-curators addressing Frankenthaler’s interdisciplinary influences and the continuing resonance of her work among contemporary artists, musicians, and performers.

Header image: Detail of Helen Frankenthaler, Divertimento, 1983. Lithograph, 37 x 27 in. Grey Art Museum, New York University Art Collection. Gift of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, 2023.9.5