On November 12, 2025, The Block Museum welcomed artists Anna Kunz and Soo Shin and art historian Lane Relyea for Printmaking in Process, an evening shaped by the spirit of experimentation at the heart of Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper. Moderated by exhibition co-curator Stephanie S. E. Lee, the conversation unfolded as a lively meditation on risk, material agency, and the unpredictable ways artworks come into being.

Lane Relyea opened with a vivid look at Helen Frankenthaler’s early soak-stain paintings and prints, describing how thinning pigment and pouring it onto unprimed canvas transformed “oil on canvas” into “oil in canvas.” This reversal, he noted, allowed color to find its own edges and created compositions that feel discovered rather than drawn. He linked this sensibility to printmaking’s choreography of plates and registrations, suggesting that Frankenthaler’s precision and her embrace of chance were always intertwined.

Artist Anna Kunz followed by reflecting on Dreaming of Floating, the 1998 etching and aquatint included in the exhibition. As a young artist invited to work with master printers, she recalled feeling both intimidated and liberated by the process. Printmaking, she said, required her “to stand my ground and also let it rip,” a balance that shaped her approach to experimentation. Kunz then traced how that early experience carries into her current practice, where fabrics, wall paintings, and large-scale color fields are created through transfer, seepage, and improvisation. Whether working on paper or canvas, she treats each surface as a place where color can act like a body, moving, leaning, and pressing into the viewer’s space.

Soo Shin shifted the conversation from the studio to the shoreline. Her work in the exhibition is part of Pas de Deux, a project in which she places paper and pigmented wooden balls inside a floating vessel and lets the Pacific Ocean generate marks. Tethered to the vessel, she experiences the ocean as a collaborator rather than a backdrop. “What’s on the page,” she explained, “is not a representation of the ocean, but a record of our shared choreography.” Shin described the project as shaped by ideas of gesture, distance, and connection, influenced by Frankenthaler’s material openness and by artists such as Francis Alÿs and William Anastasi.

In a closing exchange on experimentation today, both artists emphasized staying receptive rather than searching for novelty. Shin described experimentation as “staying open in the process,” and Kunz added that the ability to “get lost” remains essential. The evening ended with a fitting line from Frankenthaler, offered by Lee: “At the end of the day, it is how you resolve your doubts.”

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.