Holding Onto Modernism: An Essay on Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell’s paintings from the late 1950s manifest the global persistence of abstract approaches to artistic form mid-century. In light of the pop, minimal, and other literal art that would soon displace abstract painting in American and European galleries, Mitchell’s work can seem narrow—nostalgically bound to an alignment of feeling with material, coherent central structures, and distanced pictorial space. But how might we understand her to be building upon an unfinished conversation, historically dominated by men​, stalled ​in "all-overness," about what was necessary for transformative sociality to go forward within the still relatively new structures of modern life?   

Lecturer: Professer Elise Archias

Open to the campus, Henry Hall 303