Elizabeth Smith, executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, will present a CollectionTalk lecture at 5:30 p.m. March 21 at Sheldon Museum of Art. The talk is free and open to the public.

Smith will give insight to the career and enduring legacy of artist Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011), whose monumental painting, “Red Frame,” is featured in the exhibition “Sheldon in Focus: The New York School.”

Frankenthaler devised an innovative painting technique in which she poured diluted acrylic paint directly on unprimed canvas, thereby saturating it and creating large pools of color. This upended the usual method of building up pigment on a surface in order to create the illusion of depth.

Besides Frankenthaler, Smith’s writings and exhibition projects have ranged from the work of artists Uta Barth, Lee Bontecou, and Jenny Holzer to mid-twentieth-century architectural topics including the Los Angeles Case Study Houses.