MOCA GA / Katherine Mitchell

Katherine Mitchell: Places of Memory and Dreams
2010/2011 Working Artist Project (WAP)
Exhibition Dates: December 17, 2011 – March 31, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, December 16th / Thursday, January 26th

The MOCA GA 2010/2011 Working Artist Project selected by Allison Unruh, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis.

Click here to view more work by Katherine Mitchell in the MOCA GA Permanent Collection.

Katherine Mitchell (b. 1944 in Memphis, Tennessee) is an Atlanta-based artist, who received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and a MFA from the Georgia State University. Mitchell has extensively exhibited in Atlanta, across the United States, and abroad. She has had more than 20 solo exhibitions, including a major solo exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in 2005, and her first museum solo exhibition at Factory/Kunsthalle/Krems in Austria in 2006. In 2007, Atlanta City Gallery East held a retrospective exhibition that spanned 32 years of Mitchell’s career. Her work has been collected by numerous museums, including the High Museum, MOCA GA, Carlos Museum, the Speed Museum in Louisville, KY, and the Arkansas Art Center. She has exhibited widely, including the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, and the American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters in New York. Mitchell is a retired Senior Lecturer in Drawing & Painting at Emory University, where she taught for 29 years.

“These works explore the ways in which the houses in which we have lived in our early lives influence our dreams, day-dreams, creativity and art. The texts embedded in these paintings include many ideas from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, whose book The Poetics of Space was important in my conceiving of these works. He said, “Through poems [or paintings] we touch the ultimate poetic depth of the space of the house,” which “is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams of mankind.” Bachelard also reflected on the importance of “a dream of elsewhere.” This idea is seen in the works based on journeys involving a formative, early experience of literature. The inner journey, like the inner dwelling, is essential.”
– Katherine Mitchell