Installation view of “The Erosion of Time: A Digital Compilation of Works by Des Lucréce and Dean Mitchell” (Museum of Art + Light; photo by Emma Tuttle)
Two exhibitions at The Museum of Art + Light showcase the consummate American artist’s mastery of portraiture and distinctive portrayals of the American scene
Dean Mitchell is an American artist of the first order. The Florida native touched Kansas City’s art scene for more than two decades and was employed by Hallmark as an illustrator from 1980 to 1983. Now we have the privilege to survey Mitchell’s highly accomplished oeuvre in his return to the Midwest, with two engaging new exhibitions at the innovative Museum of Art + Light in Manhattan, Kansas.
The third-floor exhibition, “Heritage & the Human Condition,” assembles the full range of Mitchell’s 2D practice in more than 50 oils on panel and on canvas, paintings in egg tempera, acrylics, watercolors, graphite drawings, pastels and etchings. Across media, Mitchell presents a sensitive, studied approach to the human form that shines through in several family portraits, at times profoundly intimate and sometimes uncomfortably honest. Many works in this exhibition were sourced from the artist’s own family collection, spanning some 40 years. It explains the sense that we’re meeting a gallery of the artist’s cherished family, friends and colleagues.
“Boundary,” a 1995 oil on panel portrait, introduces the retrospective with frank naturalism. In the 40 x 30-inch vertical painting, a seated elderly black man leans halfway into the narrow center column of the work, his white hair backlit against a flat, buttery background. The man’s figure is stark and sturdy in his seat. The chair supports zig and zag beneath him suggesting a journey — perhaps near its end. He meets our gaze squarely with mouth parted slightly, “Shall you pass?” he seems to say. In this aperture his worn features are subtly illuminated, enclosed by a brooding doorway. It’s that uncertain moment of checking on an aged loved one, not knowing what one might find. Nevertheless, we respect the sitter’s boundary because the artist does.
Consider the reverent portrait of “Miss Highbaugh” (1993), oil on panel, with her pensive expression shielded by a spectacular blue hat. Delicately lit, all the painting action centers on the topography of the elder’s memorable features. The faces and limbs of Mitchell’s sitters, especially loved ones, carry extraordinary lived experience in their individual wrinkles and expressions. The monochrome backgrounds in Mitchell’s portraits focus our attention on the quiet narrative quality of their faces. Mitchell doesn’t shy away from unguarded emotion; he shows us one-of-a-kind helpings of love and loss, grief and endurance. His paintings allow us time for a vibe check. It’s not just one feeling; it’s complicated, isn’t it?
Mitchell leans into the frailty of aging, bodies and brains subjected to natural cycles, trauma, inevitable erosion. The artist invites these painful realities into his pictorial space and transforms them into recognizable, acceptable, satisfying forms. It’s the tender way that the artist views his subjects that settles in while viewing the work. One notices his sitters are placed at oblique angles, from just behind, often looking slightly away, or simply in straight profile. It’s the closely observed way one stares at people in church, mixed with the weird POVs one experiences waiting around with strangers at the DMV. Ecce homo!
Mitchell grew up in church and says he “likes to probe people” that he is painting. The artist’s empathy toward his subjects is palpable. In “Release Me” (1991), the artist welcomed the relentless, dehumanizing dying process into his visual repertoire, recording the bodily awkwardness of suffering into a careful, dignified rendering of a man resting on a quilted bed. It’s an uncomfortable scene to be present with, and somehow there is beauty in the bent human form. We can take courage in looking. Several of these treasured family portraits are relatives near the end of life, bodies vulnerable, enduring, waiting for one’s maker for the best possible ending. The artist invites us in these pictures to participate in the empathic imaginary. We are in the presence of a humanist.
Mitchell’s minimalist compositions display a distinct abstract quality, with skillfully modeled forms against flat planes of low-key color. His more recent portrait style of the 2020s tilts toward painterly cubism, constructing faces and bodies from broad multidirectional planes of pigment. He pays close attention to light and effectively creates soft, indirect and raking lighting effects throughout his works. Mitchell’s work echoes the haunting loneliness of Edward Hopper, the obsessive draftsmanship of Andrew Wyeth, and the earlier glow-y mysticism of Henry Ossawa Tanner.
After all, Mitchell is a realist painter and illustrator of the American scene, with a foot in two centuries, concentrating on portraits and people, rural and urban architecture from the South, the West and Midwest. Beyond figuration, his work spans landscape, still life, Black history paintings and even some nonobjective abstraction. It’s a surprise to the artist that he’s made money at his painting. It
speaks to his humble roots, one who started as a kid with a paint-by-numbers set, or later, worked as a young man in the tobacco industry of northern Florida.
THE PATH TO SUCCESS
Mitchell showed talent and dedication for visual art from an early age. His younger self, motivated by the realist impulse, “wanted to make it look like something.” An early art teacher told Mitchell that “he suffered technically but had the ability to see abstractly,” which was much harder to teach. Perhaps the compliment stung at the time, but he cultivated his gift of sight by going to museums, learning from curators and directors along the way, while finding ways to perfect his technique. After years of academic study in Columbus, Ohio, and a ton of awards, Mitchell distinguished himself in the medium of watercolor but expanded broadly over his career as a commercial and studio artist.
Mitchell mentions as inspirations Norman Rockwell’s narrative illustration style in the same breath as 20th-century postwar artists like Robert Motherwell and Joan Mitchell (no relation). This Mitchell finds abstract beauty in the isolated Native American reservations of Arizona as much as the distinctive doorways of New Orleans, the hulking tobacco barns of his Florida youth, or the faded glory of the decaying urban rust belt. Mitchell is a consummate American artist with an authentic vision of Black, Indigenous experience in the South, the Midwest and the West. His career has ticked practically all the art boxes. At this stage, approaching late career, clear-eyed and openhearted, Mitchell says matter of factly, “It’s more about doing the work, and changing humanity for the better.”
On the ground floor, Mitchell’s companion exhibition, “The Erosion of Time: A Digital Compilation of Works by Des Lucréce and Dean Mitchell,” marks the artist’s foray into the digital immersive medium. Created in collaboration with the design team of Museum of Art + Light, the atmospheric production was built from 400 to 500 of Mitchell’s art images over six months. Beginning with scenes of the artist’s youth, swampy Florida cypress trees and tobacco fields, the immersive work transitions to the sweaty streetscapes of New Orleans, which the artist perceives “just like an abstract painting.”
On a larger-than-life scale, Mitchell’s subtly animated musicians and street people, kith and kin, lead us on a journey through rural Southern and Western America, laced with poetic texts and a delicious jazz soundtrack. “The Erosion of Time” cleverly pairs Mitchell’s immersive with a stark contrast in Des Lucréce, an emerging digital GIF artist whose “Monsters” are graphically grown out of video game culture, digital painting and street art.
Is Dean Mitchell “old school”? Yes, in the best way possible. Does Dean Mitchell make American art? Black art? Southern art? Western art? Jazz art? Human art? Thankfully, yes. Best of all, the artist has remained human.
“Heritage & the Human Condition” continues at the Museum of Art + Light, 316 Pierre St., Manhattan, Kansas, through March 9, 2026. “The Erosion of Time: A Digital Compilation of Works by Des Lucréce and Dean Mitchell” runs through April 30, 2026. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday and Wednesday-Saturday, and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Closed Tuesday. Admission charges vary. For more information, 785.775.5444 or artlightmuseum.org.
