Announcing the 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellows

We are pleased to announce the 2022 recipients of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, which annually awards 15 artists working in the evolving fields of painting and sculpture with $60,000 each in unrestricted funds, distributed over a five-year period. Fellows will receive an initial $20,000 payment this year and annual installments of $10,000 for the subsequent four years. In addition to the monetary award, Fellows are invited to participate in one-on-one professional practice consultations; convenings that cultivate a peer learning community; and programs that focus on personal finance, legacy planning, and thought leadership, among other opportunities. The Foundation launched the Fellowship in 2021, with a structure that recognizes and responds to artist feedback that inconsistent access to funding, creative community, and professional resources results in real and ongoing challenges to sustainability and career growth.

"We are excited to welcome the next cohort of Joan Mitchell Fellows, a group whose life experiences and work capture an incredible spectrum of creative visions, artistic approaches, and career stages,” said Christa Blatchford, Executive Director at the Joan Mitchell Foundation. “This Fellowship upholds the basic but profound belief that multi-year financial support can be transformative for artists, and that increased access to individuals, resources, and practical tools can enrich their practices over time."

The 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellows are:

Teresa Baker, Los Angeles, CA
Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick, Mānoa, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi
Dawn Cerny, Seattle, WA
Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Philadelphia, PA
Bethany Collins, Chicago, IL
Shane Darwent, Tulsa, OK
Amaryllis R. Flowers, Brooklyn, NY
Luis Flores, Los Angeles, CA
Scott Hocking, Detroit, MI
Virginia Jaramillo, Southampton, NY
Henry Payer, Jr., Sioux City, IA
Rocío Rodríguez, Atlanta, GA
Leslie Smith III, Madison, WI
Awilda Sterling, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Chiffon Thomas, Inglewood, CA

The 2022 Fellows represent a wide range and depth of artistic vision and approach and are of varied background, heritage, race, age, and gender. The 15 artists range in age from 31 to 83 years old. Within the group, 74% identify as artists of color, 47% identify as female, and 13% as non-binary. Their work engages with a breadth of themes and ideas, including explorations of public spaces and the natural landscape, the decolonizing of histories and places, the unpacking of trauma related to gender and sexuality, the limitations of language, and the power of myths. Ensuring a strong and diverse pool of artists year-to-year is a significant priority for the Foundation, and is supported by the Foundation’s work to bring new voices and perspectives into the nominator and juror pools each year.

To initiate the selection of the 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellows, the Foundation invited 77 artists, curators, educators, and arts administrators to serve as nominators. The nominators reflect broad geographic diversity—representing 42 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico—as well as racial, ethnic, gender, and age diversity. In this year's group, 48% of the nominators were themselves artists, and nearly half were participating in the process for the first time. They identified the 147 artists who were then invited to apply for Fellowships. A group of five jurors, who also rotate annually and represent voices from outside the Foundation, subsequently evaluated the submissions with an eye toward artistic achievement, the relationship between the artists’ stated goals and their work, and the financial impact of the award, to arrive at a final group of 15 awardees.

Among the Fellowship’s professional development and network-building programs is an annual convening. 2021 Fellows were invited to participate in the three-day-long event in June 2022 at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Among the speakers and workshop leaders were Sheetal Prajapati, a strategic planning consultant at Lohar Projects; Tempestt Hazel, cofounder of the publication and archiving initiative Sixty Inches From Center; and financial advisors Elaine Grogan Luttrull (Minerva Financial) and Brunch & Budget. The attending Fellows participated in workshops on such topics as Mapping Your Practice, Financial Management, Budgeting for your Legacy, and Narrative & Legacy Framing, in addition to wellness, arts, and culture activities across New Orleans. The convening provided ample opportunities for cohort community building and dialogue, particularly around the process of creating a personal archive and budgeting for an artist’s legacy goals. Feedback from participating Fellows will inform the direction and scope of the next convening.

"The vision for the Joan Mitchell Fellowship is to foster pathways, relationships, and the space to jointly develop meaningful opportunities for artists,” said Solana Chehtman, who began her post this week as the Foundation’s Director of Artist Programs. “We very much look forward to working with and learning from our new Fellows and, ultimately, to helping advance a healthier, more sustainable and equitable creative community.”

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