A three-day symposium in New Orleans celebrates the life and work of Joan Mitchell April 9-11, 2010. Co-organized by Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Gallery and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, this gathering will feature art historians, friends of Mitchell and film screenings. Additionally, three exhibitions bring together the three major bodies of her work: paintings at the New Orleans Museum of Art; works on paper at the Newcomb Art Gallery; and Prints at the Contemporary Arts Center.
Born in Chicago in 1925, Joan Mitchell moved to New York in 1950 where she lived and worked among artists and poets of the New York School. Already well recognized as an important abstract expressionist painter, she left New York in the late 1950’s and moved to a Parisian suburb of Vetheuil, where she worked prolifically until her death in 1992. Her expressive works exude the visual sentiments of nature-devoid of anecdote or theater and in her own words “to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower.” Mitchell composes with long curvilinear strokes or broad stains of color, contrasting warm and cool, often on unprimed, large-scale or multi-panel canvases.
Guest speakers included Ann Gibson, Ph.D. and Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware; Irving Sandler, Ph.D., art critic, historian and professor Emeritus of Art History at the State University of New York; Robert Storr, artist, art critic and Professor of Painting/Printmaking at Yale University; and Mâkhi Xenakis, artist and author.
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