Donald Mitchell

M-P

16 Dec

African-American artist Donald Mitchell was born in San Francisco in 1951 and has lived with his family in the Bayview/Hunters Point district all his life. Mitchell has been a studio artist at Creative Growth Art Centre in Oakland since 1986. His early work consisted primarily of obsessively crosshatched fields of lines or brush strokes that obliterated the ground and hid any trace of the underlying image.

Several years ago, a change began in Mitchell’s responsiveness to his environment that heralded an accompanying change in his artwork. Beginning in small sections of each piece of art, Mitchell started to uncover the faces and forms buried in the darkness. Soon the work began to be populated by figures both in motion and in thought-filled repose. The dense compositions of scrawled lines or expressive brushstrokes create visions of the relationships between people that are both dependent and independent of each other. The forms are autonomous or overlapping, in horizontal fields or a vertical line, with imploring gazes that stare out to the viewer. He renders these anonymous people one by one until his page is covered with often dozens of totemic figures. Today his fundamental imagery remains the same – legions of crowded figures march across the now illuminated field of his vision.

Donald Mitchell is the subject of an artist’s monograph, edited by Cheryl Rivers and published by Creative Growth in October 2004, with contributions by Tom di Maria, Lucienne Piery, Frank Maresca and Lyle Rexer, and Colin Rhodes. Donald Mitchell’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum.