Tina Mitchell, a visual artist from Long Island, is Munson’s 2024-25 Artist-in-Residence. Mitchell works with a variety of media to create two- and three-dimensional sculptures and installations, and is interested in using imagery of doorways, nets, holes, and cells to explore internal and external themes of play, systems, and freedom. At the School of Visual Arts, she focused on using art to understand the way in which play is both hindered and encouraged in adult life.

Mitchell’s artistic practice is inspired by her passion for art education and her experiences teaching students in a wide range of ages across numerous institutions. Her artwork manipulates representations of space in order to explore their possibilities for expressing joy, excitement, or fear. She combines sculpture and painting, blurring pictorial space with physical space and rejecting predetermined structures through painting and application of color. Mitchell will discuss her work in a lecture at 11 a.m. Monday, Sept. 23, in Munson’s Sinnott Family–Bank of Utica Auditorium.

 

“The artists that come to us each year from all over the world really energize Munson’s campus with new community class offerings and fresh ideas in the studios and museum education projects,” said Audrey Hasen-Taylor, community arts and residency director at Munson. “We hope our community takes advantage of Tina’s class offerings this fall and spring as well as come to see the annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition in March at the Museum.”

 

Greatly influenced by the teachings of painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky of the Bauhaus school, Mitchell is teaching a fall community arts class that breaks down the concept of abstraction into a series of experiments while engaging in critical thinking—Intro to Multimedia Abstraction. She will also be teaching two courses this semester at Pratt Munson College of Art and Design: Light, Color, and Design and Fine Arts Seminar.

 

Mitchell holds a master of fine arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and a bachelor of fine arts degree from Syracuse University.

 

About the Artist-in-Residence Program

 

The AIR program is designed for artists or recent master of fine arts graduates interested in working in art education, community arts, and college curricula while receiving support to develop a vibrant, self-directed studio practice.

 

Programming for the AIR includes presenting a public lecture, teaching community arts education classes, holding a public open-studio event, and designing and implementing accessible community projects with various departments on campus. Artists receive financial support, housing, meals, studio space, and an exhibition in the Museum of Art.

 

The 2024-25 Munson Artist-in-Residence Program is made possible with the generous support of Sunithi S. Bajekal.

PLATINUM INVESTORS