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Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and SFMOMA Co-Organize Joan Mitchell Retrospective

BALTIMORE, MD – The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) are co-organizing a comprehensive retrospective of American artist Joan Mitchell. The exhibition will bring together a breathtaking array of paintings, drawings, and prints from public and private collections in the U.S. and Europe that together reveal Mitchell’s inner landscape—experience, sensation, memory—expressed with an intensely athletic grace. Mitchell’s acclaimed masterworks will be joined by rarely seen paintings and works on paper, bringing to life the artist’s varied creative processes and the intense experiences they embody, inviting the viewer to experience the trajectory of her career. The exhibition is co-curated by Katy Siegel, BMA Senior Programming & Research Curator and Thaw Chair of Modern Art at Stony Brook University, and Sarah Roberts, SFMOMA Andrew W. Mellon Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture. It will open in Baltimore in April 2020, travel to San Francisco in September 2020, and then move to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in February 2021.

“Joan Mitchell’s independent sensibility, fusing feeling and the natural world through a passionate physicality, make her a riveting subject for the present moment,” said Christopher Bedford, BMA Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. “I am proud that Baltimore will play a role in celebrating an artist whose staggering accomplishments and historical importance are only beginning to be fully recognized.”

“The time is right for a thoughtful reconsideration of Mitchell’s work and her impact on postwar painting on both sides of the Atlantic,” said Neal Benezra, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “SFMOMA’s holdings include five exceptional paintings from Mitchell’s early years in New York and the last years of her life in Vétheuil. Her stunning 1989 painting Bracket has welcomed visitors to our fourth floor since our reopening in 2016, and we are proud that this important retrospective will be the first special exhibition presented in our Fisher Collection galleries.”

Joan Mitchell. Bracket. 1989. The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. © Estate of Joan Mitchell. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel.