Who is your favorite female artist?
Write to us as 1001@si.edu and tell us who you like best! Why do their images and life stories appeal to you?
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Speak Out!
Who is your favorite female artist?
Write to us as 1001@si.edu and tell us who you like best! Why do their images and life stories appeal to you?
Many people prefer the work of revolutionary artist Helen Frankenthaler. Beginning in the 1950s, she painted abstract images using experimental techniques.
She spread huge pieces of canvas on the floor of her studio, pouring the acrylic paint from cans and pushing it with sponges. Frankenthaler thinned the paint so that the pigment did not sit on the surface of the canvas as paint always had, but soaked into the fabric, establishing a new relationship between the medium and its support. Frankenthaler's "stain painting" was her personal invention.
Source: Elizabeth Chew. Women Artists (brochure, Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).
Pictured: Helen Frankenthaler, born 1928, Small's Paradise, 1964, acrylic, 100 x 93 5/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of George L. Erion.