At The Baltimore Museum of Art from March 6, 2022 — August 14, 2022, this Joan Mitchell exhibition features approximately 70 works from public and private collections.
BMA Senior Curator Katy Seigel discusses the exhibit here. On “beauty”:
Mitchell chose differently. There is a beautiful/ugly duet, especially in the 50s and early 60s work—in their essay for the book, Eileen Myles dives into that quality in City Landscape, and Mitchell’s openness about her own strength, even when that strength was perceived as abrasive. For a few months “Fierce Beauty” was the working title for the show; in the end, we titled the intro to the catalog “Beautiful Weed,” because that’s how Mitchell saw herself: unruly, out of place, not always valued, and yet beautiful, as she put it.
Sebastian Smee notes:
Arguably the most acclaimed of the second generation of abstract expressionists, Mitchell came to prominence in 1950s New York, before spending more than four decades in France. This retrospective, co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, will open in Baltimore with 70 works borrowed from public and private collections in the United States and Europe.
Mitchell’s work is discussed several times in the book Abstract Painting: Concepts and Techniques .