Description:

Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper highlights artists who have challenged the boundaries of control and gesture in their artwork.

In this program, artists Anna Kunz and Soo Shin—both featured in the exhibition and represented in The Block’s collection—join associate professor Lane Relyea (Northwestern University, Department of Art, Theory, and Practice) for a conversation about their artistic practices, influences, and connections to Frankenthaler’s legacy. The discussion will be moderated by exhibition co-curator Stephanie S.E. Lee (2024–25 Block Museum Art History Graduate Fellow and Belle da Costa Greene Curatorial Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum).

Together, the panel will reflect on how contemporary artists continue to stretch the possibilities of print, paper, and process—situating Frankenthaler’s innovations in an evolving dialogue.

Participation level – light, audience members can choose to participate in the Q&A at the close of the program.

Artist Anna Kunz creates luminous, vibrant works that span paper, painting, and fabric.  Kunz’s tessellating shapes seep into and lean on one another; she calls this “compassionate geometry”.  Her work has been featured in numerous esteemed national and international collections, with exhibitions held in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, New York, Madrid, and Poland.  Kunz has collaborated with architects, dancers, and musicians to produce décor for theatrical and dance performances, notably for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and The Seldoms.  She has curated an exhibition for the Morton Arboretum and is a founding member of the Chicago chapter of the Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery.  She splits her time between living and working in New York City and Chicago, and her main studio is in the woods of Southwest Michigan.

Soo Shin (b. Seoul, Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. She received the Northern Trust Acquisition Award (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) at Expo Chicago and has been awarded fellowships from the Loghaven Artist Residency (Knoxville, TN), the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (Woodside, CA), the Vilcek Foundation Fellowship at MacDowell, and the Illinois Arts Council Artists Grant. Her work has been exhibited at PATRON Gallery (Chicago, IL), The Rivalry Projects (Buffalo, NY), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Goldfinch Gallery (Chicago, IL), Chicago Manual Style (Chicago, IL), LVL3 (Chicago, IL), and the Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL), among others. She has also completed residencies at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI) and Ox-Bow (Saugatuck, MI). Shin holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as both an MFA and a BFA from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea.

Lane Relyea teaches in the Department of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University.  He has served as the editor in chief of Art Journal. Since 1983 his essays and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Texte zur Kunst, Artforum, Frieze, Afterall, Parkett, Modern Painters and Flash Art. His book Your Everyday Art World, on the effects of communication networks on artistic practice and its contexts, was published in 2013 by MIT Press.  His essay “The Appollonian Domestic” appeared in “The heroine Paint”: After Frankenthaler, edited by Katie Siegel (2015).

Stephanie S.E. Lee is a PhD Candidate in Art History at Northwestern and co-curator of Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding. She specializes on the history of printmaking, with a particular focus on early twentieth-century art between France and East Asia. Before joining the Block, she held positions at the Art Institute of Chicago, Rijksmuseum, and the Newberry Library. Lee is currently a Belle da Costa Greene Curatorial Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan, where she is working on another Helen Frankenthaler exhibition.   

Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper is curated by Stephanie S.E. Lee, 2024–25 Art History Graduate Fellow and Corinne Granof, Academic Curator, at The Block Museum of Art. Generous support for the exhibition was provided by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. The exhibition is supported in part by The Alumnae of Northwestern University. The Graduate Fellow is generously supported by The Graduate School (TGS), Northwestern University.