On March 6, the Baltimore Museum of Art will open an exhibition featuring 70 works by American artist Joan Mitchell.
The exhibit, which was originally scheduled for 2021 and postponed due to COVID-19, will run until Aug. 14.
Mitchell – an influential member of the postwar movement Abstract Expressionism – navigated the art circles of 1950s New York before moving to France in 1959, where she spent the rest of her life creating abstract paintings.
Mitchell was creating art at a time when female artists rarely achieved widespread recognition.
The artist “grappled with conflict between the social roles prescribed by her gender and social status and her desire for true creative freedom,” Katy Siegel, senior curator at BMA and one of the co-curators of the exhibit, said in a news release.
“She was not simply ‘making it’ in an environment created and occupied by men, she was actively remaking painting and its possibilities,” she said.
Siegel co-curated the exhibit with Sarah Roberts, a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Siegel, Roberts, and research teams from both museums and Stony Brook University spent more than three years reviewing hundreds of paintings across the United States and Europe.
In addition to paintings by Mitchell, the presentation includes archival photographs,
letters, poems, and other materials from the Joan Mitchell Foundation to contextualize the artist’s work.
Tickets for the exhibit will go on sale Feb 7.
The museum also announced that it will extend its hours to 9 p.m. on Thursdays, starting March 10.
