Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Feminist Art Base: Robin Mitchell

Robin Mitchell lives and works in Santa Monica, California. She received both her BFA (1972) and MFA (1974) from the California Institute of the Arts. While an undergraduate student at Cal Arts she was a member of the Feminist Art Program and worked on the historic Womanhouse Project.She is a recipient of the 2006 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, the Anonymous Was A Woman Award 1996, A City of Los Angeles Art Grant 1997, and a National Endowment for the Arts Award in 1987. In additon to art making, she teaches studio art courses at Santa Monica College and Pasadena City College. The artwork is represented by the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, California.The artwork is involved with the act of mark making and how the mark in its abstract nature is able to communicate an image and transcend beyond to suggest themes both tangible and intangible. Over the years my artwork has evolved from formal concerns to embrace a more spiritual imagery alluding to aspects of nature, both of the natural world and of human nature.In many of the paintings there is a strong central imagery that is reflective of personal identity, both physically and psychologically. In earlier work there was often a vertical column of bead-like forms, alluding to the spine, a symbol of both inner strength and biological structure. In more recent paintings, this spine-like column has evolved to take on the characteristics of a tree, or plant and flower forms. Symmetry is an essential aspect of these images.The artwork includes a variety of medium including paintings on canvas, drawings and paintings on paper, prints, and sculpture and represents a wide range of sizes from the intimacy and immediacy of very small works on paper to large paintings on canvas. For the last few years I have concentrated on paintings on paper. The intimacy and directness of these works provide me with an introspective quality. The artwork is evolving quickly at this time and is a body of work that is obsessive, detailed, and very hand involved. I have find these paintings to be extremely close-up, or almost microscopic investigation of themes that I have been exploring in my work for a long time, - symmetry, mark-making, gesture, and a kind of organic growth of thought and image. It is almost as if I have moved inside the painting.

In the early part of the 1970’s I was an art student at the California Institute of the Arts where I received both my BFA and MFA in Art. I was aware of the role of women artists in both academia and the art world and had questions about how this would affect my future as an artist. These questions and concerns led me as an undergraduate to join the Feminist Art Program, which was in its first year at Cal Arts. Because of this I was involved in the historic Womanhouse project. This experience of the Feminist Art Program was both wonderful and awful, challenging and frustrating. I discovered a history of women artists that I was unaware of, in spite of the fact, that my mother was an artist. This was exciting and life changing for me. Where did I, as a young woman artist, fit into all of this? I felt a sense of responsibility and obligation to my future as woman artist. I had a legacy of feminism to act out of. I could not ignore it or deny it. I did not want to I think that I have been most influenced by my women artist friends who were going through the same evolution and development that I was. Have things changed? Yes. No. Some. There is a persistence of a veil of an incomplete understanding of many women’s artwork. Women artists are still judged by a different standard than men. Middle-aged women who came to awareness during the beginning of the Feminist Art movement seem to be held to a truly different standard than younger women artists who have assumed many of the hard-won achievements as a given and a right. Judy Chicago felt that women’s art was mainly expressed through “central core imagery.” I found this to be a ridiculous summing up of the possibilities of women’s creativity. Ironically, much of the artwork that I have made is symmetrical with a sense of physical entity at the core. Many of my images echo flower-like forms that obliquely refer to the female and sexuality. This gives me great pause for introspection and contemplation. I have had the reward of watching my imagery grown and evolve. I have also seen the art world change in many ways. I still wonder if my work is fully appreciated and understood by anyone but me.