On September 22, 2023, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation brought together colleagues and peers for a lively discussion on how visual arts organizations can increase their resiliency and reduce their climate impacts in the face of climate change during Climate Week NYC. 

Held at the New Museum, “Expanding Climate Action in the Visual Arts” spotlighted the work of select Frankenthaler Climate Initiative grant recipients, including the California Institute of the Arts, the National Nordic Museum, the Swiss Institute, and the Taft Museum of Art, and featured rousing call-to-action closing remarks from leadership from the RMI and the Gallery Climate Coalition.

This event was recorded on video: watch now

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation announced today that it is expanding its commitment to climate action in the visual arts, increasing funding for its Frankenthaler Climate Initiative (FCI) from $10 million to a total of $15 million and extending the grantmaking program to include at least two additional cycles in 2024 and 2025. This extension builds upon the success and growth of the initiative since first launching in 2021, which has included the tripling of the Foundation’s initial $5-million commitment and the broadening of its applicant parameters to include museums, non-collecting visual arts organizations, and art schools.

The Foundation simultaneously announced it is awarding $2.7 million to 48 art organizations across the country through its third grantmaking cycle, which launched earlier this year, bringing the total funding conferred to date to more than $10.8 million.

This talk, given by Foundation Executive Director Elizabeth Smith, reflected on Frankenthaler’s six-decade career in painting and printmaking, as well as specific works on view and from the museum’s collection. The lecture happened in conjunction with the exhibition The Pillars (in Norwegian: Søylerommet) which included Frankenthaler’s 1976 painting Sentry alongside artworks by other leading women artists.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation announced ten new recipients of its Frankenthaler Prints Initiative, an ongoing program for university-affiliated art museums that reflects the Foundation’s commitment to supporting undergraduate and graduate education in the visual arts and art history.

The awardees include ten museums from across the U.S., each of which will receive a group of prints and five to ten related trial proofs drawn from the Foundation’s extensive collection of work by Frankenthaler. The museums also receive a one-time grant of $25,000 to develop a project or program for the study, presentation, and interpretation of the editions and proofs within a three-year timeframe.

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