Roscoe Mitchell - Rabbit

Roscoe Mitchell

Roscoe Mitchell has been a leading figure in the performing arts for over 50 years. Born and raised in Chicago, Mitchell formed the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble in 1966, featuring Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors. Three years later, adding Joseph Jarman, upon their departure to Paris for a two-year sojourn, during which they added Famoudou Don Moyé, the group transformed into the collective interdisciplinary troupe called the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Mitchell had been painting since 1963, and he continued on and off into the heyday of the Art Ensemble and through a hyperproductive sequence of decades of solo music, improvised encounters, and music for Mitchell-led ensembles. The pandemic afforded Mitchell time off-road in which he began painting very avidly again. The exhibition Keeper of the Code: Paintings 1963-2022 at Corbett vs. Dempsey surveyed his work from the most recent canvases—including a series of compositionally complex four-by-four-foot works—all the way back to the beginning, when Mitchell was a promising young saxophonist and ambitious autodidact painter. Mitchell's 1968 painting "The Third Decade" is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been the subject of recent exhibitions at The Pit in Los Angeles and The Aubergine in Madison, Wisconsin.