Baltimore Museum of Art and SFMOMA Announce Comprehensive Joan Mitchell Retrospective

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announced today that they are co-organizing a comprehensive Joan Mitchell retrospective. The exhibition will bring together an array of paintings, drawings, and prints from public and private collections in the U.S. and Europe. The exhibition is co-curated by Katy Siegel, BMA Senior Programming & Research Curator and Thaw Chair of Modern Art at Stony Brook University, and Sarah Roberts, SFMOMA Andrew W. Mellon Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture.

The exhibition will first open at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (September 4, 2021–January 17, 2022), then travel to Baltimore Museum of Art (March 6–August 14, 2022), and later to Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (Fall 2022). (Please note these dates have been updated from the original release: order of venues and dates have shifted due to COVID-19 closures.)

Curators Katy Siegel and Sarah Roberts noted in the museums' announcement: "The exhibition and catalogue will be based on deep primary research and will present new scholarship on Mitchell's life and her extraordinary body of work. We also are convening emerging and established scholars, curators, conservators, writers, and artists to reconsider Mitchell's role in the postwar artistic interchange between the U.S. and France, and to study intensively her materials and process.”

The Joan Mitchell Foundation Archives will lend a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks and archival photographs, animating both her process and her daily life.