Joan Mitchell Foundation
Joan Mitchell
Artist / Painter
Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925. After graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947, she was awarded a James Nelson Raymond Foreign Traveling Fellowship, which took her to France for a year in 1948-49, and it was there that her paintings moved toward abstraction. Returning to New York, she participated in the famous “9th Street Show” in 1951, and soon established a reputation as one of the leading younger American Abstract Expressionist painters. She exhibited regularly in New York throughout the next four decades and maintained close friendships with many New York School painters and poets.
In 1955 she began dividing her time between New York and France, and in 1968 she settled in Vétheuil, a small town in the countryside outside of Paris, where she worked continuously until her death in 1992. During the almost 50 years of her painting life, as Abstract Expressionism was eclipsed by successive styles, Mitchell’s commitment to the tenets of gestural abstraction remained firm and uncompromising. Summing up her achievement, Klaus Kertess wrote, “She transformed the gestural painterliness of Abstract Expressionism into a vocabulary so completely her own that it could become ours as well. And her total absorption of the lessons of Matisse and van Gogh led to a mastery of color inseparable from the movement of light and paint. Her ability to reflect the flow of her consciousness in that of nature, and in paint, is all but unparalleled.”
Mitchell gave personal support to many young artists who came to stay with her at Vétheuil – sometimes for just one night; sometimes for an entire summer. Correspondence in her papers reveals that this generosity often had a life-changing impact on those that spent time with her. Her generosity in her own lifetime continued after her death with the formation of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, called for in her will in order to create support and recognition for individual artists. In addition, the Foundation mission includes the promotion and preservation of her legacy, which includes her remarkable body of work, her papers, including correspondence and photographs, and other archival materials related to her life and work.
Joan Mitchell
Artist / Painter
Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925. After graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947, she was awarded a James Nelson Raymond Foreign Traveling Fellowship, which took her to France for a year in 1948-49, and it was there that her paintings moved toward abstraction. Returning to New York, she participated in the famous “9th Street Show” in 1951, and soon established a reputation as one of the leading younger American Abstract Expressionist painters. She exhibited regularly in New York throughout the next four decades and maintained close friendships with many New York School painters and poets.
In 1955 she began dividing her time between New York and France, and in 1968 she settled in Vétheuil, a small town in the countryside outside of Paris, where she worked continuously until her death in 1992. During the almost 50 years of her painting life, as Abstract Expressionism was eclipsed by successive styles, Mitchell’s commitment to the tenets of gestural abstraction remained firm and uncompromising. Summing up her achievement, Klaus Kertess wrote, “She transformed the gestural painterliness of Abstract Expressionism into a vocabulary so completely her own that it could become ours as well. And her total absorption of the lessons of Matisse and van Gogh led to a mastery of color inseparable from the movement of light and paint. Her ability to reflect the flow of her consciousness in that of nature, and in paint, is all but unparalleled.”
Mitchell gave personal support to many young artists who came to stay with her at Vétheuil – sometimes for just one night; sometimes for an entire summer. Correspondence in her papers reveals that this generosity often had a life-changing impact on those that spent time with her. Her generosity in her own lifetime continued after her death with the formation of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, called for in her will in order to create support and recognition for individual artists. In addition, the Foundation mission includes the promotion and preservation of her legacy, which includes her remarkable body of work, her papers, including correspondence and photographs, and other archival materials related to her life and work.
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Kara Walker: Back of Hand / Prince McVeigh and the Turner BlasphemiesSep 21 – Dec 3, 2023The Georgetown University Art Galleries are thrilled to present Kara Walker: Back of Hand in their de la Cruz Art Gallery, for the first exhibition of these new works in Washington by this internationally renowned artist. The exhibition displays a series of new works on paper by Kara Walker that examine themes such as complicity, racism, misremembered histories, and the violence that undergirds the legacy of the South. (more…)
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Kapwani Kiwanga / The Length of the HorizonSep 16, 2023 – Jan 7, 2024Research-based, thematically highly topical, and future-oriented – these terms can be used to describe the impressive work of Kapwani Kiwanga (b. 1978). From September 16, 2023 to January 7, 2024, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg will present the first comprehensive mid-career retrospective of the Canadian and French artist (more…)
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Allan Sekula: Fish StoryAug 24, 2023 – Jun 21, 2024Photographer, theorist, and critic Allan Sekula (US, 1951–2013) is known for photographs and essays that blend researched, descriptive realism with emotionally impactful narrative. His photography actively engages ideas around labor, capitalism, and Marxist theory, providing complex and poignant critiques about social reality. (more…)
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Ingel Vaiklaartist / filmmakerIngel Vaikla is a visual artist and filmmaker from Estonia. She studied photography in Estonian Academy of Fine Arts (BA) and film in Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Gent (MA). In her work she questions the relationship between architecture and its users, and the representation of architecture in camera based mediums. (more…)
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Richard Serra: TransmitterOngoing“I consider space to be a material. The articulation of space has come to take precedence over other concerns. I attempt to use sculptural form to make space distinct.” –Richard Serra (more…)
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Nan GoldinJul 8, 2023 – Jan 28, 2024The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. Nan Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – began life as a slide show screened in the clubs and bars of New York where Goldin and her friends worked and played. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which has recently become part of the National Gallery’s collection. (more…)
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Julian Charrière: ErraticAug 6, 2022 – May 14, 2023The fascinations of the Arctic and Antarctic have captured our collective imagination for centuries. For the last decade, French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière has traveled to remote and hostile polar regions to explore humankind’s interconnection with these otherworldly environments (more…)
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Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman: Ancestral Clouds Ancestral ClaimsOct 5, 2023 – Mar 17, 2024Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s first solo exhibition in Austria. It is centered around the presentation of a new work, coproduced by Kunsthalle Wien. The eponymous film is the latest part of a series called Elemental Cinema; each film in this series is dedicated to one of the four elements. In it, the artists have developed an approach that takes matter, material, and the elemental as its starting point – aspects which continue to be neglected and suppressed by the globally dominant order of thinking and being. (more…)
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I Remember NothingLIMITED EDITIONIn the midst of chaos we hunt for dreams. It blends together. Their memories became my memories. Once-present. A personal story of search and encounters, of escape and returning. (more…)
