Helen Frankenthaler Exhibition cotton jersey sweatshirt
Helen Frankenthaler Exhibition cotton jersey sweatshirt
For Autumn 2023, a Helen Frankenthaler exhibition sweatshirt is meticulously fashioned using the time-honored technique of silk screen printing. Our do-it-yourself approach utilizes a heavyweight 12 oz. cotton jersey to pay homage to the artist’s 1989 Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Presented on the front (along with ten of the exhibition’s works, chronologically, on the back) of our heavyweight 12 oz. washed cotton jersey sweatshirt and slightly oversized.
Only a limited number of 20 were made.
Crewneck
Off-white 12 oz. washed cotton jersey
Blue Helen Frankenthaler screen print
Blue Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective exhibition screen print at the back
Made in Canada
Silk screen printed in New York
Rib trim
Slightly oversized silhouette
Fabric: 100% cotton
Unisex
Widely seen as one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century, Frankenthaler was a key figure in the evolution of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Visiting Jackson Pollock’s studio in 1951 inspired Frankenthaler to adopt a spontaneous approach to painting. Mountains and Sea, her breakthrough work painted in a single day, signaled a new method called soak-stain. Considered a second generation abstract Expressionist, Frankenthaler’s work embraced references to the natural world, several of which are included here: Swan Lake I (1961), Nature Abhors a Vacuum (1973), and Into the West (1977).
Silkscreen printing is one of the oldest forms of printmaking. The technique, as we know it today, can be traced as far back as the era of Song Dynasty Art in China, around A.D. 960-1279. Japanese artists then turned screen printing into a complex art by developing an intricate process wherein a piece of silk was stretched across a frame to serve as the carrier of hand cut stencils. By the 15th century, silkscreen printing eventually found its way to the west.
For much of the 20th century, this printing method was kept confidential and safeguarded as a “trade secret.” As an artistic form, it appeared for the first time in the United States in the 1930s when a group of artists working with the Federal Art Project experimented with the technique and subsequently formed the National Serigraphic Society. American artists began making "fine art" screen-prints and devised the term "Serigraph" (derived from the combination of two Greek words, seicos, meaning silk, and graphos, meaning writing) to distinguish fine art from commercial screen printing.
In printmaking, each print in an edition is considered an original work of art, not a copy. During the 1960s, silkscreen printing became popular with Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, who were attracted to its bold areas of flat color. The technique would go on to make up a large percentage of printed garment works. Silkscreen's predilection for bold and graphic designs makes it ideally suited for our graphic exhibition sweatshirts.
