One of the Baltimore Museum of Art’s big exhibits for 2021 has been pushed back to 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead of opening next month, the much-anticipated retrospective of abstract expressionist artist Joan Mitchell is now scheduled to open at the BMA on March 6, 2022, and run through August 14, 2022.
The Mitchell show will open at the San Francisco Museum of Art on September 4, 2021 and remain on view there until January 17, 2022. A curatorial collaboration between the BMA and SFMOMA, the Mitchell exhibition originally supposed to travel to San Francisco after closing in Baltimore but will now originate there instead and then travel to Baltimore.
The reason for the change in the tour schedule is that the curators weren’t able to obtain all the works for the show in time for a March opening due to COVID-19, according to BMA senior director of communications Anne Brown.
Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925, died in France in 1992, and created abstract oil paintings, drawings and prints. This will be a major retrospective of her work. The schedule change means the BMA’s special exhibition galleries will be dark until this fall, when a new exhibit on Etta Cone and Henri Matisse opens October 3.
Along with the new dates for its Joan Mitchell exhibit, the BMA announced details for three solo exhibitions that will open in its Contemporary Wing on March 28.
The shows are Sharon Lockhart: Perilous Life; Tschabalala Self: By My Self; and Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness. They are part of the museum’s 2020 Vision, an initiative to provide greater recognition for female-identifying artists and leaders that began in 2020 and has been extended into 2021.
The three exhibitions were scheduled to open last year but their openings were postponed twice due to COVID-19. They are now scheduled to remain on view through September 19, 2021. In addition, Katharina Grosse’s immersive work of art, Is It You? (2020), which opened March 1, 2020, will also remain on view in the central gallery of the Contemporary Wing until September 19, 2021.
The museum last week announced plans to admit small groups by appointment starting February 6 and lasting until March 7. Brown said directors are still working out the details for the solo exhibitions opening on March 28 and for a more complete reopening of the entire museum.
