Dennis Lee Mitchell was born in Larned, Kansas, where he spent much of his childhood exploring the outdoors. He attended Kansas State University at Fort Hays where he received a B.A., followed by an M.F.A in ceramics from Arizona State University. Mitchell was a 2016-2017 recipient of a Pollock/Krasner Grant and has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Mitchell’s works has been critically reviewed in the Denver Art Review, the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun and Chicago Art Magazine, and has been the subject of scholarly essays by Donald Kuspit, Peter Seeves, Victor M. Cassidy and Paul Klein. His work is held in many private and public collections including the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, the Clarke House Museum in Chicago, and the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, among others. He lives and works in the D.C. area where he has a 2,300 square foot studio suited for his experimental practice.
Dennis Lee Mitchell
With blowtorch in hand Dennis Lee Mitchell, then a ceramicist, was inspired by the soot left on a piece of paper that had been accidentally grazed. In the spirit of a true abstract expressionist, Mitchell represents himself on his own terms using the rarely executed medium of smoke even as he walks in the footsteps of Yves Klein and Claudio Parmiggiani, who both experimented with smoke. Unlike his predecessors, however, smoke has been his primary medium to date.