In Memoriam: Henrietta Mantooth

We at the Foundation are fondly remembering Henrietta Mantooth (1924–2025), a New York artist with an exceptionally vivacious and generous spirit who passed away recently at the age of 100. A member of the Joan Mitchell Foundation community for many decades, Mantooth was a 1994 recipient of the Foundation's Painters & Sculptors Grants, completed a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in 2016, and participated in the Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) program.

A native of Kansas City, Mantooth moved to New York in 1945 to pursue a career in journalism. This led her to Venezuela and Brazil, where she worked for English newspapers from 1947 to the early 1960s. While in South America, Mantooth started a family and began studying art, first exhibiting her paintings in Brazil in the late ‘50s. In 1962, Mantooth and her family moved back to New York, where she developed her career as an artist in the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement and worked as a set designer for local theaters.

Mantooth’s paintings and installation work, spanning more than seventy years of practice, drew on diverse imagery from her daily life and many travels to present social commentary on poverty, racism, the criminal justice system, and other humanitarian concerns. She wrote, “My painting can be described as ‘witnessing.’ The work is often based on images and stories in the news, people who look out at us every day from the printed page and television screen but who are usually nameless—refugees, rebels, farmers, men and women who tend and defend their land, homes, children, animals and ideas. My intention is that they speak out from the paintings: ‘HERE WE ARE.’”

Mantooth received the Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) Award in 2010, and was paired with a Legacy Specialist and studio assistants to help organize and document her artwork and papers. In 2013, she wrote: “Being part of CALL has brought new life to my studio. The discipline and enjoyment of bringing to light hundreds of works on paper and canvas with the companionship and expertise of Legacy Specialist Anne Polashenski helped to break the solitary endeavor which art making is in modern times. In fact, I rediscovered my art. As I went through years of work of the past, I suddenly began to admire my own discipline and perseverance. Seeing the sense of adventure in my early work and knowing that art is about bravery, I asked myself: Am I still brave enough to be an artist? Of course the answer has to be yes.”

Beyond the active years of her involvement with the CALL program, Mantooth remained actively connected with the Legacy Specialists and studio assistants who supported her career documentation process through collaboration and creative exchange. She will be missed and remembered by many in our community.

To learn more about Henrietta Mantooth, visit her website, read her reflections on the CALL program (2013), or watch her CALL/VoCA Talk (2016).