Home Journal From the Field: Caitlin Haskell on Joan Mitchell Scholarship in Chicago

From the Field: Caitlin Haskell on Joan Mitchell Scholarship in Chicago

City Landscape is an abstract painting composed of a central tangle of vibrant colors—purple, pink, orange, green, red—on a mostly gray background, subtly divided into rectangular areas. It is shown hanging on a white gallery wall over a wooden floor.
Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955. Oil on linen, 80 x 80 inches (203.2 x 203.2 cm). Collection of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. © Estate of Joan Mitchell. Photo by Coco Jia.

On Thursday, October 23 at the Art Institute of Chicago, curators Caitlin Haskell (Art Institute of Chicago) and Sarah Roberts (Joan Mitchell Foundation) will present "Joan Mitchell at 100: Six Paintings from Six Decades." This conversation will offer a close look at Mitchell’s life and work through an analysis of six artworks spanning from the 1940s to the 1990s. The event kicks off a scholarly symposium on Mitchell, hosted by the Art Institute on the occasion of Mitchell’s centennial to foster new interpretations of the artist’s life and work.

In a museum gallery space with white walls and wood floors, a group of 15 college students face a square abstract painting.
University of Chicago students looking at City Landscape at the Art Institute of Chicago. Photo by Rachel Cohen.

Leading up to the symposium, and seeding early research for a forthcoming exhibition on Mitchell, Haskell recently led a seminar for University of Chicago students that offered opportunities for close study of Mitchell’s work and a comprehensive review of the artist’s exhibition history. The seminar culminated with students proposing a focused, one-room exhibition of Mitchell’s work—offering participants valuable practical experience in researching and developing a checklist, requesting artworks for loan, creating a gallery layout, and drafting interpretive materials.

In a darkened lecture room, people sit around a central table looking at a screen showing a gallery space with multi-panel abstract paintings.
Exhibition proposal by Tianhe Chen, presented during University of Chicago’s Joan Mitchell seminar class. Photo by Tacy Wagner.

For the final project, one participant, Tianhe Chen, proposed an exhibition titled “Joan Mitchell: Poetics of Architecture.” Chen writes, “In Mitchell’s work from 1970-75, her expansive color blocks operate as spatial structures, which she occasionally calls ‘fields’ and ‘territories.’ I selected six paintings for the exhibition, anchored by Chasse Interdite, a quadriptych that crystallizes Mitchell’s architectural approach to painting.”

Chasse Interdite, 1973, abstract painting by artist Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell, Chasse Interdite, 1973. Oil on canvas, 110 1/4 x 283 1/2 inches (280 x 720.1 cm). Collection of Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Another student, Coco Jia, proposed an exhibition focusing on Mitchell’s sunflower paintings. Jia writes, “Sunflowers as a motif had significant meaning to Mitchell's life and work, and I wanted to explore how her style and understanding of sunflowers evolved over the years.”

Reflecting on what she learned in the class, Jia noted, “I was really moved by Mitchell's dedication as an artist. She was determined, ambitious, and lived and breathed art, continuing to paint very large-scale works until the end of her life, even when she was physically weak from cancer.”

Chen reflected, “What fascinates me most is Mitchell’s capacity to embrace the in-between, producing a hybridized creative voice that emerges from flux and dislocation. This kind of cosmopolitan sensibility is something the art world was only beginning to recognize.”

In a darkened lecture room, people sit around a central table with laptops looking at a screen showing a floor plan of an exhibition space with abstract paintings placed and labeled.
An exhibition proposal presented during University of Chicago’s Joan Mitchell seminar class. Photo by Coco Jia.

“We had an intrepid group of UChicago undergraduate and graduate students in the Joan Mitchell seminar,” said Caitlin Haskell, “and I suspect that there could be several future museum curators among them. The rigorous research the students performed to chart Mitchell’s exhibition history (often with help from the Joan Mitchell Foundation archives) was extremely useful for my own curatorial process, and I found it inspiring to see the fresh, artist-focused approaches they brought to exhibiting Mitchell’s work in their final projects.”

Caitlin Haskell is the Gary C. and Frances Comer Senior Curator in Modern and Contemporary Art and director of Ray Johnson Collections and Research at the Art Institute of Chicago. Register here for Caitlin Haskell and Sarah Roberts’s event at the Art Institute of Chicago.