Breaking: South Carolinian among 2024 Joan Mitchell Fellows
Decorated artist gets $60,000 multi-year fellowship
Michaela Pilar Brown continues to be included in the national arts conversation, today—and for the next five years—for being named a 2024 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellow.
Michaela Pilar Brown. Image from Joan MItchell Foundation.
The Joan Mitchell Fellowship annually recognizes and supports 15 U.S.-based artists working in the evolving fields of painting and sculpture. Encompassing long-term financial support, skills development, and community building, the multi-year fellowship structure provides critical resources that artists need to sustain their practices.
The Fellowship provides each artist with $60,000 in unrestricted funds, distributed over the course of five years. The financial support is interwoven with learning, peer engagement, and network-building opportunities, tailored by staff based on the artists’ interests and feedback. The offerings include in-person and virtual convenings; workshops on finance, legacy planning, and self-advocacy; and consultations with arts professionals. The depth of each artist’s participation directly impacts their experience of the Fellowship. Fellows in the fourth year of the program and beyond are also eligible to apply for a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans.
With an honor of this magnitude, clearly Brown is no stranger among #SCArtists. The Columbia-based sculptor was the 2018 winner of ArtFields, was executive director of 701 Center for Contemporary Art, and now owner/director of Columbia’s still-new art space and gallery, Mike Brown Contemporary in the Vista (a South Carolina Cultural District).
Brown was the 2011 Harvey B. Gantt AIR at the McColl Center for Art and Innovation. She is one of the six American artists selected to participate as a Resident Artist for Open Immersion: A VR Creative Doc Lab, produced by the CFC Media Lab, The National Film Board of Canada (NFB), and and JustFilms | Ford Foundation. She was an Inaugural Resident Artist at the 2016 Sedona Summer Colony and a 2016 Artist-in-Residence at Kunstlerwerkgemeinschaft, Kaiserslautern, Germany.
“I am interested in peering beneath things. I use racially identified signifiers to twist and turn mythologies about the body and the spaces, places, and histories that it occupies, often landing at the concept of home as both physical structure and repository for history, memory, and myth,” Brown says in the artist statement on her fellowship page.
Joining Brown are:
- Scott Anderson, Albuquerque, New Mexico
- Victoria Burge, Harrisville, New Hampshire
- Peggy Chiang, Brooklyn
- Ruby Chishti, Brooklyn
- Sharif Farrag, Reseda, CA
- Emilie Louise Gossiaux, New York City
- André Leon Gray, Raleigh
- Joe Harjo, San Antonio
- Rebecca Morris, Los Angeles
- Gamaliel Rodríguez, Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico
- Abigail Kahilikia Romanchak, Waiohuli, Hawaii
- Rupy C. Tut, Oakland, California
- Yvonne Wells, Tuscaloosa, AL
- Sandy Williams IV, Richmond, Virginia
“I am excited to welcome our 2024 Fellows, whose work represents new ideas and approaches in artmaking and for whom these unrestricted grants can have a transformative impact on their lives and their work,” Joan Mitchell Foundation Executive Director Christa Blatchford said.
The jurors selecting this year’s Fellows were: Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Adriana Corral, artist, Texas; Michelle Grabner, artist, critic, and independent curator, Wisconsin; and Elana Herzog, artist, New York. Los Angeles-based curator Diana Nawi additionally participated in the first round of application review. Now in its fourth year, the program has awarded $3.6 million in funding directly to artists since 2021.
Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) was an abstract artist whose prolific career spanned more than four decades. She worked in a variety of mediums—including oil on canvas, pastel on paper, and lithographic printing—and is widely recognized as one of the most significant artists of the post-war era.
Born in Chicago on Feb. 12, 1925, Mitchell attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon graduating in 1947, she was awarded a travel fellowship that took her to France for a year, where her paintings became increasingly abstract. Returning to the United States in 1949, Mitchell settled in New York and became an active participant in the “New York School” of painters and poets. Ultimately, she would split time between New York and Paris before moving to France in 1968.
Mitchell’s major awards and accomplishments include: Le Grand Prix des Arts (Peinture) of the City of Paris (1991); the Award for Painting from the French Ministry of Culture (1989); the inaugural Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association of America (1988); honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1987) and The Western College, Oxford, Ohio (1971); and the Premio Lissone, Milan (1961).
Mitchell died in Paris on October 30, 1992. Her generosity in her own lifetime continued after her death with the formation of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, called for in her will in order to create support and recognition for individual artists. In addition, the Foundation’s mission includes the promotion and preservation of her legacy, which includes her remarkable body of work, her papers (including correspondence and photographs), and other archival materials related to her life and work.