Donald Mitchell (American b. 1951)

Donald Mitchell with work, photo courtesy of Le Citizen Hotel du Canal, Paris

Mitchell, the third of eleven siblings, was hit by a bus at the age of thirteen, making him thereafter prone to seizures and visual and aural hallucinations. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and diagnosed with moderate intellectual disability and schizophrenia. In 1975, he was released to his family and soon after began working at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, an art education center for adults with disabilities. His first drawings were ambiguous and undistinctive, characterized by fields of undifferentiated cross-hatching and executed with pen and ink on paper. Mitchell’s early work reflects his fragile state, but after a decade of work in the communal atmosphere of Creative Growth, his drawings began to display a growing responsiveness to his environment. Small faces emerged in the lines and hatches. Soon the faces multiplied, acquired bodies, and massed together on Mitchell’s sheets of white paper. The figures, floating and overlapping, are generally identical; however the slight variation between each one captures an instant in the production of drawing. Mitchell’s prolific work is now filled with figures in motion and repose, and his trademark has become a tightly composed, graphically sophisticated page of crowded figures. As his reputation grows, his work has found an audience in the mainstream contemporary art world with exhibitions at New York’s White Columns and Gavin Brown Enterprises, among other venues.