American artist Joan Mitchell is best known for her gestural abstract oil paintings, drawings, and prints. Mitchell gained notoriety as an active member of the New York School collective of painters and poets in the 1950s and as an exemplary Abstract Expressionist painter. Throughout a career that spanned more than four decades, Mitchell created paintings inspired by memories of the world around her, translating feelings and observations into sweeping, sometimes colorful brushstrokes. Through abstract forms, Mitchell’s work endeavors to express feeling when words are not enough.

–Akilah Hartgrove, from the Glenstone Field Guide