To celebrate the launch of Joan Mitchell: Paintings, 1979–1985, please join Julie Otsuka and Sarah Roberts in conversation about Mitchell's work and life as a painter.

Discover Joan Mitchell’s powerful and dynamic work—spotlighted in this book as never before.

This highly anticipated publication focuses on the years 1979 to 1985—a significant and deeply generative period within Joan Mitchell’s decades-long career. As Mitchell became even more fully immersed in daily life at her property in Vétheuil, France—surrounded by lush gardens, and challenged and inspired by new creative relationships—her studio practice flourished and her work became even more ambitious and expansive. Executed in an increasingly bold palette, the works from this period exemplify Mitchell’s nuanced mastery of composition, scale, and color. In addition to her large-scale abstract works, this publication features numerous smaller paintings and a selection of archival materials.

Included in the book are several texts that complement the illustrated works. A new essay by the bestselling author Julie Otsuka recollects her encounters with Mitchell’s paintings over the years. A fascinating conversation between Mitchell and the French philosopher Yves Michaud from 1986 is featured. Reflections by the artists Amy Sillman, Shinique Smith, and Lily Stockman each explore a unique component of Mitchell’s oeuvre or practice, underscoring Mitchell’s continued influence on artists today.

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Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four-decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell’s inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and remarkable adeptness with color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time.

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Julie Otsuka is the award-winning and best-selling author of The Swimmers (2022), The Buddha in the Attic (2012), and When the Emperor Was Divine (2003). Her books have been awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the American Library Association Alex Award, among other distinctions.

 

 

Sarah Roberts joined the Joan Mitchell Foundation in June 2024 as Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs. In this role, she oversees the Foundation’s collection, archives, digital assets, and licensing, as well as the Joan Mitchell catalogue raisonné project. She previously served as the Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, where she organized exhibitions and directed research initiatives on the museum's permanent collection for twenty years. She served as primary author and research director of the museum’s Rauschenberg Research Project (2013), the first scholarly digital publication produced by SFMOMA, under the auspices of the Getty Foundation Online Scholarly Initiative. In 2017, she co-curated the museum’s presentation of the retrospective exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Erasing the Rules. In 2021, she curated Joan Mitchell, a major retrospective organized with Katy Siegel and the Baltimore Museum of Art, for which she also co-authored and co-edited the exhibition catalogue. Her last exhibition for SFMOMA, Amy Sherald: American Sublime opened in November 2024. Other previous exhibitions include Louise Bourgeois Spiders (2017-19); Carol Bove and John Chamberlain: Converse (2019-2020); and Frank Bowling: The New York Years (2023). Prior to joining SFMOMA, Roberts held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and deCordova Museum and Sculpture Part, Lincoln, MA.

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