Mitchell, Corinne 1914–1993

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Corinne Mitchell 1914–1993

Artist, educator

“If you have a talent, you shouldn’t put it under a bush,” painter Corinne Mitchell told Mae Ghalwash of the Washington Post. “You should   spread the knowledge and share it with potential artists and the public.” Mitchell lived by these words; as she painted, she taught art, mentored artists, and fought barriers to get her work and the work of other African-American artists shown in American galleries. In 1992 she became the first African American to have a solo exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Corinne Mitchell, the eleventh of 18 children of a tobacco farmer, was born on March 10, 1914, in Virginia. Her childhood consisted primarily of doing chores in the house when she was young, working in the fields when she turned 14, and playing baseball on the family team on weekends. “I pitched, caught, played outfield,” she recalled in the Washington Post, “I was a real tomboy.” Her family, especially her siblings, taught her to stick up for herself. “I was brought up with boys, and [they] are rough, so I could never go in anywhere and be meek,” she explained in an interview with the Washington Post. “It was just my personality. I gave ’em word for word.”

Mitchell showed artistic talent at a very young age. In between chores, she would sketch whatever she could. Her parents noticed and encouraged her to cultivate her talent. When the family had guests over, for example, Corinne would draw their portraits to present to them as gifts. She left home when she was 18 to receive formal training, attending St Paul’s College and earning an associate’s degree in 1935. The same year she began teaching art in the Mecklenburg public schools. She later pursued further education at Virginia State College and earned a bachelor’s degree in education in 1951. Mitchell left Mecklenburg in 1956 and moved to Washington, D.C, where she taught art in the Montgomery County Schools until her retirement in 1982.

Mitchell had trouble with the administration of the Montgomery schools for several years after she began teaching there. “I had no problems with the students or the parents,” she recounted in the Washington Post, “it was the principals. They couldn’t cope with a strong black woman.” Mitchell received inaccurate teaching evaluations, and her supervisors and principals tried to convince her to retire; some even tried to get her fired. After she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, however, the harassment stopped.

Mitchell faced discrimination not only as a teacher, but also as an artist. She discovered that it was difficult for African Americans to get their work shown. “I’ve always felt that my work was comparable to many outstanding artists’  and felt that it should have been shown in galleries,” she explained in the Washington Post. “I hated the idea of being ignored, and I still hate the idea of black artists being ignored. When you go into many of the galleries, you don’t see the work of black artists.”

Mitchell has also dealt with the ramifications of negative stereotyping. She found that when galleries do accept the work of African Americans, they often take only certain kinds of work. “There is too much emphasis on the buffoon type of work—work that shows African Americans as distorted human-figures,” she observed in the Washington Post. “Why isn’t there a variety of black artists’ work? Some artists do happy work; they express love and naturalistic work. I want to see all types of work by black artists, because they do all types—abstract, realistic, representational.”

At a Glance…

Born Corinne Howard, March 10, 1914, in Mecklenburg, VA; died April 21, 1993, in Washington, DC; daughter of William H. Elizabeth (Jackson) Howard; married William E. Mitchell, 1938 (died 1985); children: Lloyd, William, Charles. Education : St Paul’s College, AA, 1935; Virginia State College, B.A., 1951; George Washington University, MA, 1965.

Teacher in Mecklenburg public schools, 1935-56, and Montgomery County School, 1956-82. Founder of Theta Sigma Upsilon sorority, 1979, and Eta Phi Sigma sorority, 1981.

Member: Zeta Phi Beta sorority, Manor Park Neighbors Inc. (chairperson), Keep Washington Clean Society (founder, 1960; president 1975-85), D.C. Art Association Harlequin Ball (founder, 1971), D.C. Committee for the Arts, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Urban League, Women’s Caucus for Art (conference chair, 1991), National Museum of Women in the Arts (founding member).

Awards: Outstanding Civic Work Award, Neighbors Inc., 1974-75; Appreciation Award, Manor Park Neighbors inc., 1974; Black Emergence Fund Award, 1976; National Conference of Artists Appreciation Award, 1979; Eta Phi Sigma Art Sorority/Elizabeth Catlett Award of Excellence, 1981; awards from Zeta Phi Beta, 1981, Theta Sigma Upsilon, 1982, Eta Phi Sigma, 1986, and Harrison Elementary School, 1986; Community Art Project Monetary Award.

Mitchell responded to these problems in several ways. Always active in civil rights causes, she supported institutions that favor under-represented artists. She was a life member of both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League; she joined the National Conference of Artists in 1958; and she donated $5,000 as a founding member of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Mitchell also served as a mentor to many young African-American artists. “My work was out there, but I didn’t stop at that. I saw so much talent out there among [black] artists that I felt the need to organize them and encourage them to continue to show and share with the public,” she explained in the Washington Post. She founded two separate sororities for African-American female artists, Theta Sigma Upsilon in 1979 and Eta Phi Sigma in 1981. The purpose of both sororities was to find and create opportunities for the artists to show their work. Gloria Green, president of Eta Phi Sigma, described this process, and Mitchell’s role, in the Washington Post : “As a group, everyone paints all the time and we would have umpteen pieces of work, so [Mitchell] would say ‘Okay, we’ll have a show’ and go ahead and arrange it. When [she] wants to get something done, she goes out and does it.”

Mitchell frequently sought out creative approaches to art shows and also tapped her teaching experience. With the Eta Phi Sigma Sorority, for example, she built an exhibit in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library specifically for blind children. Rather than using bright colors, the artists concentrated on mixing a variety of textures and shapes that the children could touch.

Mitchell’s creative response to the problems of race she encountered was to paint. “When my principal gave me a hard time, that’s when I would come home and paint all night,” she related in the Washington Post. Her pride in her heritage and anger at the world come through in her work. For example, she once created a collage of acrylic and newspaper clippings to express her grief over the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Another piece, Three Wise Women, which depicts three shrouded women huddled together, combines Mitchell’s African-American heritage with a feminist tone. In a review of the work in the New Art Examiner, Mary McCoy wrote, “Speckled and heavily veiled in layers of rainbow hues, its three figures recall the virgin, mother, and crone of the triple goddess, even as they take on the humble, unobtrusive posture once required of both blacks and women. These secretive figures represent mystery and the maintenance of a hidden wisdom at which outsiders can only guess.”

One of most striking of Mitchell’s works is the result of her reflections on the 1963 March on Washington. Two years before the march, Mitchell dreamed that people would rise in protest over violence against blacks. “But i couldn’t join because of my [teaching] job, and I couldn’t leave my children,” she told the Washington Post. “So what could I do?” She opted to paint. For the two years before the march, she painted her dream onto a canvas measuring five feet by six feet. On the day of the march, she went to watch. “It was a beautiful sight to see [them] coming … as far as you could see in any direction, there were people,” she said. Two years later, she added the people she saw to the images she had dreamed, and finished The March.

Despite problems of discrimination, Mitchell’s work has received notice and shows. Beginning in 1969, her work was included in the annual exhibitions at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Neighborhood Museum. In September of 1992 six of her works were shown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The exhibit, entitled A Glimpse of Joy, was the first solo one by an African-American artist to be held at the museum. Six months later, the Charles Sumner School in Washington, D.C., presented 29 of her works in a 30-year retrospective.

In 1991 lung cancer forced Mitchell to stop painting; the fumes irritated her condition. She did not give up art or expression, nor did she significantly reduce her activities. Instead, the artist switched to new mediums. She worked on an autobiography, explored sculpture, and began making African masks. When Mitchell finally succumbed to her disease in April of 1993, she left behind a rich legacy of proud creativity, respect for artists and their works, and a tradition of standing up for oneself and one’s colleagues that touched many artists’ lives.

Sources

Books

Cederholm, Theresa Dickason, Afro-American Artists; A Bio-Bibliographical Directory, Trustees of the Boston Public Library, 1973, p. 201.

Exhibition 1973: January 14, 1973 to February 28, 1973, at the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum—Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1973.

Exhibition 1974-75; November 17, 1974 to January 29, 1975, at the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum—Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974.

JPC Art Collection, Johnson Publishing Company, 1974.