Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Donates $2 M. to Smithsonian American Art Museum for Modern and Contemporary American Art Fellowship

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation has donated $2 million to the Smithsonian American Art Museum to support its fellowship program, marking the largest donation the program has received in its 53-year history and completing a $10 million capital campaign for it.

The gift will be used to create an endowment for a fellowship focused on modern and contemporary American art, to be called the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship. The first Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship will be awarded for the 2024–25 academic year, with applications due on November 1, 2023.

Housed within SAAM’s Research and Scholars Center, the fellowship is available for scholars at all levels, from doctoral students to established scholars, as part of the research necessary to complete a dissertation or a book. In addition to endowing the new fellowship, the $2 million gift will also be used for professional development resources for all fellows active in the Research and Scholars Center.

“Writing a dissertation or book can be a lonely and tedious process,” SAAM director Stephanie Stebich told ARTnews in an email.“ It takes a very long time, and much of it is spent alone traveling between various libraries and archives. There is also a history of scholars carefully guarding their work. SAAM’s fellowship program is a sort of antidote to this isolation—it is a nurturing space where scholars learn from each other, deepening and expanding their thinking.”

Stebich was appointed the museum’s director in spring 2017 and launched the $10 million capital campaign the following year, in the run up to the fellowship program’s 50th anniversary in 2020. She realized that its “outsized impact as an educational and research institution” meant that it required greater funds to continue its scholarly work.

“We are building on the excellence of the past 50 years of this program,” Stebich said. “The funds we’ve raised are meant to ensure that we can meet the needs of a new and diverse generation of students and scholars. The demographics of our field are changing, and more financial resources means we can expand the number of fellowships we award and enrich those fellowships with new opportunities for learning and professional development.”

In an emailed interview, Frankenthaler Foundation executive director Elizabeth Smith said the decision to support the fellowship program can from its distinguished “focus on American art—a field that was central to Frankenthaler and one she helped to shape over the course of her extended career.”

She continued, “SAAM’s fellows represent a truly exciting cross-section of the best of the field. The exhibitions, publications, and scholarly work generated by the fellows represent an expansive and inclusive vision for American art, and we recognize the importance of creating the time and space that such scholarship requires.”

Since 2018, the Frankenthaler Foundation, which was established during the artist’s lifetime and became active in 2013, two years after Frankenthaler’s death, has been active in supporting art history and visual arts programs at universities across the country. Other grant programs include a major climate initiative, Covid-19 relief, emergency support for artists and heritage sites in Ukraine, and the creation of the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting, administered by Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

In 2018, it gave four art schools—Columbia University School of the Arts, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture, and the Yale School of Art—$50,000 each to endow a scholarship for MFA students concentrating on painting. In 2020, it gave the Graduate Center at CUNY, Harvard University, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago $50,000 each to create endowments for fellowships for doctoral students studying art history.

“SAAM’s program, which is noted for its support of emerging and established scholars of American Art, is a logical extension of this spirit and our philanthropic commitment to higher education in the arts,” Smith said.

Added Stebich, “SAAM has spent the last few decades expanding its holdings of modern and contemporary art, yet we were missing an endowed fellowship to support research on these collections. Helen Frankenthaler was one of the leading American artists of the twentieth century, and the Foundation, which she established in her lifetime, has a great reputation for supporting innovative scholarship. Establishing an endowed fellowship in the foundation’s name devoted to modern and contemporary art seemed pitch perfect.”