Helen Frankenthaler at Bennington
Lecture by Elizabeth Smith of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation
By: Bennington - Nov 06, 2026
Art at Bennington in Conversation is pleased to welcome Elizabeth Smith, executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, to present at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, in Tishman Lecture Hall.
Smith will address the scope and range of Helen Frankenthaler’s work, its impact during Frankenthaler’s lifetime, and how the work of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is building and extending her legacy.
“I’ll also consider the significance of her Bennington education as a grounding for her development as an artist and how she remained connected to the College over time,” said Smith.
In 2013, Elizabeth Smith was named the first executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York City, an artist-endowed foundation established by the renowned painter, sculptor, printmaker, and Bennington College alumn Helen Frankenthaler ’49 during her lifetime.
The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is dedicated to promoting greater public interest in and understanding of the visual arts. It aims to preserve Frankenthaler's legacy by publishing a catalogue raisonné, organizing and encouraging significant exhibitions of her work, and making grants in other areas of the visual arts. The Foundation is a long-time partner of Bennington's Museum Fellows Term, in which students are provided an opportunity to live and study in New York City and to intern with premier arts organizations for the College’s Field Work Term and spring term. Smith served as a visiting faculty member in the program from 2017–2021.
Before assuming this post with the Frankenthaler Foundation, Smith was executive director of curatorial affairs at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto since 2010. There, she expanded the gallery's international reach and helped to commandeer such high-profile exhibitions as Abstract Expressionist New York from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
“The Visual Arts faculty is delighted to welcome Elizabeth Smith to campus this fall as part of the Art at Bennington in Conversation series,” said J Blackwell, faculty member in Visual Arts. “Helen Frankenthaler’s work is a model for the practice of painting as experimentation and discovery. We look forward to hearing Elizabeth’s thoughts on Helen Frankenthaler's legacy and on how studying visual arts alongside the liberal arts influenced Helen's artistic development.”
Smith's other previous positions include chief curator and deputy director for programs at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Smith has taught at the University of Southern California and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a 2012 Fellow of the New York-based Center for Curatorial Leadership. In 2012 she served as a Center exhibitions panelist, and she contributed to the Center's 2013 publication Pigeons on the Grass, Alas: Contemporary Curators Talk About the Field.
Art at Bennington in Conversation is a series of Tuesday evening talks and events which features Bennington faculty, alumni, and others discussing their work and the arts. These talks are intended to highlight scholarship and creative practice, to foster cross-disciplinary and cross-medium conversations, and to reflect on pedagogy. All lectures begin at 7:00 pm. Events are free and open to the public.
About Bennington College
Bennington College is a liberal arts college in southwestern Vermont that has distinguished itself as a vanguard institution within American higher education. It was the first to include the visual and performing arts in a liberal arts education. It is the only college to require that its students spend a term—every year—at work in the world. Bennington students work intensively with faculty to forge individual educational paths around their driving questions and interests.