Kenneth Mitchell

Kenneth Mitchell (1949, Brooklyn, NY–2008, Brooklyn, NY) had a passion for art and design that was evident from a young age. Raised in Harlem by his grandmother, Mitchell attended private art lessons and, in his teenage years, enrolled at New York’s LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts. He was granted a full scholarship to the School of Visual Arts and attended from 1967 to 1968, before going into fashion as an award-winning textile designer. In later years, he worked as a peer educator at the Program for AIDS Treatment and Health (PATH) Center at the Brooklyn Hospital Center. 

Across paint and mixed media, Mitchell’s figural compositions celebrate African American identity through glamorously athletic Black physiques, while confronting stereotypes seeded by blackface minstrelsy. Engaging an illustrated, high-fashion aesthetic, his paintings are populated by sleek-bodied silhouettes that waver between femininity and androgyny. His all-over geometric sensibility responded to the abstractions of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, while introducing a novel ornamentation that drew on his fashion background; his mixed-media assemblages glitter and shine with rhinestones and polyester ribbon. 

His work was featured prominently in Release II, an exhibition presented at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in collaboration with Visual AIDS in 2005.