Joan Mitchell Foundation

06/16/2026

with 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellow Bob Dilworth: “What matters to me most are my communities of family and friends, both in my hometown of Lawrenceville, Virginia, and my current home in Rhode Island. I want to tell their stories, to describe the conditions of their lives, to explain my preoccupation with my Southern past as it comes to terms with my present life in the North. I’m seeking a ground on which to create an artistic vision that brings together the two locations, both real and spiritual, and to think about the distance I have come from those early years to now.

“My family is centered in my paintings. But it could be any family. In The Field, my mother, the dominant figure in white, leaning back and casually talking to my brother, occupies the lower left corner. Another brother to the right of the center figure talks to our niece, and my sister-in-law holds her grandchild at the top of the triangular grouping… All four seasons are present at once in this depiction of a generational assembly. This is not about yearning or sentimentality, but about fortification. As we continue to experience the chaos and destruction that surrounds us, the best way to fight against it is to stay protected by the good memories that sustain you, keep close to the family and friends that support you, and expand the ideas that will propel you to excellence.”

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Pictured here:
1: Bob Dilworth

2: Quote by Bob Dilworth

3: Bob Dilworth, The Field, 2026. Acrylic paint on canvas, 102 x 83 inches.

4: Work in progress in Bob Dilworth’s home studio

5: Bob Dilworth, Sylvia, 2021. Acrylic paint, enamel paint, markers, on canvas, 94 x 83 inches.

06/10/2026

with 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellow Cathy Della Lucia: “I'm a sculptor who makes material-based objects, primarily with wood, alongside other materials that are either going to challenge it, or compliment it. Thematically, I am interested in the relationship of the body with tools, toys, and weapons. I don’t think about my work as figurative, but it’s through these three elements that my work connects with the body or thinks about objects through their narrative with a body.

“I make works that are meant to come apart—finished objects that at a first glance reveal their parts and the logic of how they come together into constructed objects. I'm interested in tinkering and play as an important part of knowing.

“I do a lot of drawing in my practice—first by hand, and then those drawings go into the digital space, into the 3D modeling program, Rhino, where I continue pushing and pulling the forms out. I really like the impossibility of a 2D space describing a 3D form, and it’s something I ran into early on when I didn't know much about wood… There are very different rules in the 2D drawing space on paper, 3D digital spaces in Rhino, and the physical lived space that material and our bodies exist in.

“Something that I really like about the process of carving wood is the negotiation of the edge. As I get further along carving and sanding, I can take something specific and measurable with hard clean edges and really resist that edge, blurring it, and reducing it down to something soft, unmeasurable, and flesh-like. Without a hard edge, you can't just put a ruler up to it, plug it into a simple equation, and you can't easily describe it just by its dimensions. You have to understand it through the lens of something else—which could be time or touch or the sum of the forms around it. We understand an eroded stone through time or we understand something squishy because of how it reacts and records physical pressure. It becomes a narrative.”

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Captions / credits in first comment.

06/02/2026

with 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellow Sahar Khoury: “I build structures or arrangements from a very intuitive place and the process is iterative. The practice of making art is probably the most knowledgeable place I can be in terms of knowing and revealing the world to myself—but also revealing myself to myself. Making things with your hands has its own language, or like a way of getting somewhere unknown. It's like deep sea diving for a language that has no aim."

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"The practice of making art is probably the most knowledgeable place I can be in terms of knowing and revealing the world to myself—but also revealing…

05/26/2026

with 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellow Juvana Soliven: “I work in themes that have to do with bodily autonomy, intimacy, women's positionality, and human rights through a craft-based lens. Many of the objects I make result in amalgamate forms of the censored body, medical implements, weapons, adornment, and traps. I use the pixelated censor broadly in my work and interrogate it through the tedium of craft practices as a meditation on labor, protection, and the endless work needed to fight for what is ours."

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"I use the pixelated censor broadly in my work and interrogate it through the tedium of craft practices as a meditation on labor, protection, and the…

05/19/2026

with Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez: “I am motivated by what I would call a sense of justice and a desire to create visibility for people and traditions that have been relegated to the margins. I look at the place of women in the world throughout our history—what they have contributed generally, and to the arts specifically. I also have a strong interest in ways of working that get overlooked as being merely decorative or craft. For me, this is a defiance: I can and I will participate."

"I have a strong interest in ways of working that get overlooked as being merely decorative or craft. For me, this is a defiance: I can and I will…

05/13/2026

with Eric-Paul Riege: “I was told by one of my grandmothers that we adorn our body with jewelry so our Holy People can find and follow us, and that our jewelry is listening and feeling with us. I began making large textile earrings as totems of memory called jaatloh4Ye’iitsoh, meaning ‘ear rope for the big gods/monsters,’ which mimics and embellishes the traditional looped form of stacked beads."

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"My hands know more than my brain does and I let them lead. Listening to them is nice because I just kind of jump in for the ride and let them play."

05/07/2026

Sammy Seung-min Lee : “I recently opened ‘Becoming Motherland’ at _Denver. The exhibition includes new work from my Fulbright year in Seoul, which was incredibly inspiring and also raised a lot of complicated questions. ‘Becoming Motherland’ explores the difference between “motherland” as something inherited and “home” as something we create."

"Living in diaspora means you’re constantly negotiating where you belong. Art gives me a way to sit inside that complexity and translate it into form."

05/05/2026

Troy Montes Michie : “My process usually begins from a place of intuition and curiosity, but it is through literature and research that things become persistent. And that persistence almost always leads me to the archive..."

"The communities I come from have been fetishized, erased, and spectacularized by systems that were never designed to grant them autonomy. My work moves…

03/31/2026

In April at the Fondation Cartier: Joan Mitchell and poetry, a gallery talk with Leanne Sacramone and Mara Hoberman, April 2, 18:00.⁣
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En avril à la Fondation Cartier : Joan Mitchell et la poésie, avec Leanne Sacramone et Mara Hoberman, 2 avril, 18:00.

.hoberman

https://www.fondationcartier.com/programme/evenements/gallery-talk/joan-mitchell-et-la-poesie

03/05/2026

In the last years of her life, Joan Mitchell’s work became even more closely tied to nature. The line between abstraction and representation became more porous as she continued to try new ideas and methods. Direct points of reference became more recognizable, particularly trees and sunflowers, which she had painted and titled works after since the mid-1950s. Other works, such as "Merci" (slides 1 and 2), balance vast areas of unpainted canvas with spare clusters of boldly agitated marks, creating affecting compositions with minimal means.

Mitchell painted "Merci" in 1992, the same year that she passed away from cancer. This work and other late paintings demonstrate her commitment to continuing to experiment and paint, on a grand and masterful scale, through her final days.

Pictured here:
1, 2 - Joan Mitchell, Merci, 1992. Oil on canvas, 110 1/4 x 141 1/2 inches (280.035 x 359.41 cm). Collection of Joan Mitchell Foundation. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

3 - From left: Untitled (1992), Sunflowers (1990-91), No Birds (1987) installed in the Joan Mitchell retrospective at Baltimore Museum of Art. Photo by Mitra Hood.

4 - Joan Mitchell in her garden in Vétheuil, France, 1991. Photo by David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images.