2025–26 Frankenthaler Foundation Fellows left to right, top to bottom: Victor Ballesteros, Kerry Doran, Cameron Patricia Downey, Magnus Flowers, Mariana Hebling, Michael Igwe, Yan Jin, Payton Kaeding, Sé McElroy, Noah Stevens–Stein, Rachel Tang, Dilan Torres, Jacqueline Valenzuela.
Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowships
Helen Frankenthaler was committed to supporting higher education in the arts through her teaching, lectures, and charitable giving. In 2018, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation honored this legacy by launching a multiyear initiative that established one-time endowments of $500,000 at nine universities with outstanding MFA and Art History PhD programs (listed below). From these endowments, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowships are awarded annually to high-achieving students identified by faculty members. Recipients—54 to date—rank among the leading voices of the next generation of artists and art historians.
MFA Programs
• Columbia University
• School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• University of California Los Angeles
• Yale University
PhD Programs
• City University of New York
• Harvard University
• New York University
• Stanford University
• University of Chicago
Tatiana Flores, the 2025-26 recipient of SAAM's Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship
The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship was established in 2023 through a $2 million endowment gift to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Research and Scholars Center. As the leading program in American Art Scholarship, SAAM’s fellowships seek to advance the field by fostering emerging and established scholars appointed by the Smithsonian’s Office of Academic Appointments.
This year, the Foundation’s endowed fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum has been awarded to University of Virginia professor Tatiana Flores for her book project, Blackness, Indigeneity, Mixture: Race in Latinx Visual Representation, a study of how modern and contemporary Latinx artists have addressed racism, hierarchy, and inclusion. Her 2025-26 Senior Fellowship draws on significant related holdings within SAAM and the Archives of American Art. A noted scholar of modern and contemporary Latinx and Caribbean art, Flores brings a distinguished record of teaching, editorial service, and award-winning curatorial projects and scholarship—including her book Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes (Yale University Press) and the critically acclaimed exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago—to her year in residence at the museum.