arts & life
exhibits
Torn Orange was Mitchnick’s first large-scale painting.
Homecoming
Elyse Foltyn | Special to the Jewish News
Artist
Nancy Mitchnick
celebrates Detroit
with an exhibit at
MOCAD.
L
ike a salmon swimming
upstream from the ocean
to its spawning spot in the
river where it was born, artist and
Detroit native Nancy Mitchnick has
returned to her hometown more
powerful than ever.
After taking a less charted
course while working as a professor
on both coasts, Mitchnick returned
to her native Detroit in 2011, and
the meaning her hometown has
to her can be seem in her most
recent works. These, among oth-
ers, make up the 26 paintings
from her expansive career on view
in “Uncalibrated,” which runs
through July 1 at the Museum
of Contemporary Art Detroit
(MOCAD). Viewing the paintings,
one can almost track the evolution
of her style from figurative and
straight lines to a more relaxed
expression.
Born in Detroit in 1947,
Mitchnick grew up on Buffalo
Street near Six Mile Road in what
she describes as a very anti-Semitic
working-class Polish neighbor-
hood. Although Mitchnick’s
mother was Jewish, the family did
not practice Judaism and she didn’t
learn of her Jewish roots until she
was 10 years old.
“My mother was my link to
real culture,” Mitchnick says. “She
would always take me to the DIA,
enjoyed dance and loved to enter-
tain. One day I was so excited to
come home from school and show
her a new dance my friends taught
me. I sat her down and started
dancing the hora and singing ‘Hava
Nagila.’
“Just then, my mom told me it
was time we talked about some-
thing — and she told me her
family was Jewish,” she says. “She
wanted to protect me and didn’t
want the anti-Semitic neighbors to
bother me.”
Mitchnick is an iconic Detroit
artist — and she embraced an
iconic period in the city’s art his-
tory. Enthralled with painting
since she was in her 20s, first as a
figurative painter, she was central
to Detroit’s thriving Cass Corridor
art movement, focused on reused
materials and abstraction, in the
1960s and ’70s. Despite it being a
male-dominated movement and
her focusing on figurative work,
Mitchnick found the intensity of
the young artists in Detroit’s Cass
Corridor a compelling match for
her monumental passion to paint.
“Nancy exemplifies the power
and undaunting vision of someone
who came of age in Detroit during
the heyday of our Cass Corridor
art movement,” says Marsha Miro,
details
Nancy Mitchnick’s exhibition,
“Uncalibrated,” will be on view
through July 31 at the Museum of
Contemporary Art Detroit.
(313) 832-6622; mocadetroit.org.
A view of the exhibition space
44 June 16 • 2016
MOCAD founder and president.
“These artists were fearless,
approaching their subjects without
any boundaries because they had
nothing to lose. Nancy has matured
into a great painter. She works her
paintings until they capture the
image, the sense and the idea of
her subjects.”
When Mitchnick left Detroit in
1973 to begin traversing the coasts
as a professor, first at Bard College
in New York, then at the California
Institute of Arts before moving
on to Harvard University, she
experimented with new subjects
and techniques. She painted many
portraits during her early years in
Detroit before finding her passion
for landscapes on the coasts.
Now, she paints pictures of
houses (many from her childhood
neighborhood) in Detroit. Along
with her vivacious, full-bodied