Joan Mitchell at Ox-Bow: Limited Edition Prints

Ox-Bow is pleased to present a limited-edition print series featuring two paintings Joan Mitchell created during her time at Ox-Bow in 1943 and 1944. The featured works are housed in the collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation and selected in collaboration with the Foundation’s research staff to highlight Mitchell’s formative experience at Ox-Bow. 

Mitchell came to Ox-Bow as a student and left with a renewed commitment to becoming a painter. More than 80 years later, these works offer a tangible connection to that formative moment and to the landscape, community, and uninterrupted time that shaped her early practice.

For Ox-Bow, this series is an opportunity to honor Mitchell’s history here while making these works from the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s collection accessible to a new audience. It also reflects something that has been part of Ox-Bow since its founding in 1910: the belief that artists need time, space, and the opportunity to work alongside one another to develop their practice.

Joan Mitchell at Ox-Bow

Joan Mitchell attended Ox-Bow in 1943 and 1944, when the school was still known as The Summer School of Painting. She painted outdoors, worked in lithography, and spent time immersed in the landscape and rhythms of the summer.

Years later, Mitchell remembered those summers vividly:

“The best time? Saugatuck in summer.”

She recalled painting outdoors during the afternoons and working on lithography in the evenings by kerosene light. It was also at Ox-Bow that Mitchell began to think seriously about the direction of her life as an artist. Reflecting on a teacher’s emphasis on artistic decisions, she recalled making her own: to leave college and become a painter full time.

Mitchell would go on to become one of the most significant American painters of the 20th century. Her time at Ox-Bow remains an important part of that story.

The Prints

Drawn from the collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the two paintings represented in this print series, Untitled (Ox-Bow Old Inn) and Untitled (Ox-Bow Lagoon), offer a glimpse into this formative period. Both depict the Ox-Bow surroundings Mitchell encountered as a young artist those summers. Each print is released in an edition of 20, produced by Document in Chicago in collaboration with the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Prints will be available for pre-sale at a private event on November 5, and will open to the public for sale on November 23. 100% of proceeds support Ox-Bow’s mission to provide artists with time, space, and resources to develop their practice.

See the Prints in Chicago

The prints will be on view at Ox-Bow’s Chicago Office during an exhibition November 6, 2026–January 5, 2027.

In Conversation: Winnie Weiyun Szu & Joan Mitchell

The exhibition brings together the new Joan Mitchell prints and work by Ox-Bow Summer 2026 LeBlanc Painting Fellow, Winnie Weiyun Szu, bridging two generations of women painters at Ox-Bow with the same landscape as their inspiration.

Ox-Bow Chicago Office
1709 W. Chicago Ave., 2B
Chicago, Illinois

View exhibition details.

Prints will be available for pre-sale at a private event on November 5. A public opening for the exhibition will take place on November 6 from 5:00–8:00 p.m. CT., and prints will open to the public for sale on November 23.

A Place That Shapes – and is Shaped by – Artists

For more than a century, artists have come to Ox-Bow to spend focused time on their work, learn from one another, and engage with the landscape. Joan Mitchell is one of many artists whose practice and career were influenced by time spent here. Her experience is part of a long history of artists who have found inspiration, new direction, and meaningful connections at Ox-Bow.

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE PRINTS

JOAN MITCHELL

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) is widely recognized as one of the most significant American artists of the post-war era. Her abstract paintings are distinguished by their physicality, daring use of color, and personal interpretation of the natural world.

A native of Chicago, Mitchell studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She attended Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan, during the summers of 1943 and 1944, where she painted outdoors and deepened her commitment to a life as an artist. Upon graduating in 1947, she spent over a year in France before settling in New York in late 1949. There, she became an active participant in the “New York School” of painters and poets, exploring different approaches to composition and gesture as part of the emerging Abstract Expressionist movement.

Over the next four decades, Mitchell dedicated herself to the single-minded pursuit of abstract painting of the highest order, while moving between New York, Paris, and later the French countryside in Vétheuil, where she made her home from 1968 until her death in 1992. Throughout her long and varied career, Mitchell drew on experiences and memories of the world around her—particularly views of cities, fields, rivers, lakes, and trees—as sources for her work. She once said, "I carry my landscapes around with me."

THE JOAN MITCHELL FOUNDATION

The Joan Mitchell Foundation cultivates the study and appreciation of artist Joan Mitchell’s life and work, while fulfilling her wish to provide resources and opportunities for visual artists. Through its work, the Foundation affirms and amplifies artists’ essential contributions to society.

DOCUMENT

DOCUMENT is a commercial gallery located in Chicago and Lisbon that specializes in contemporary photography, sculpture, and media-based art. The gallery has organized more than 70 solo exhibitions since its opening in 2012 and actively promotes the work of emerging and established national and international artists. In their Chicago location, they jointly operate as a photographic printmaking studio facilitating the production of works by artists from Chicago and around the world.