Joan Mitchell in her Vétheuil studio, 1983. Photograph by Robert Freson, Joan Mitchell Foundation Archives. © Joan Mitchell Foundation
Montparnasse – Bienvenüe metro station, Exit 2, Lines 4, 6, 12 and 13
Villa Vassilieff is accessible to visitors using wheeled devices or who have mobility difficulties thanks to special facilities (access ramp, adapted toilets, and a lift).
In addition, several reserved parking spaces are available close to the Villa Vassilieff:
• in front of 4 rue d’Alençon, 75015 Paris
• in front of 7 rue Antoine Bourdelle, 75015 Paris
• in front of 23 rue de l’Arrivée, 75015 Paris
Consult the map of adapted parking spaces in Paris here.
As part of the centennial celebrations of artist Joan Mitchell, AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions and the Joan Mitchell Foundation are collaborating on an event on October 1, 2025, bringing together leading scholars and curators to explore Mitchell’s relationship to the second-wave feminist movement.
A pivotal Abstract Expressionist artist, Mitchell’s work has often been interpreted through the lens of her male contemporaries and within the dominant frameworks of the movement. However, the 1960s and 1970s were a transformative period for Mitchell, shaping her self-perception, career, and relationships with other women artists. This panel discussion will highlight new research and perspectives on how this historical context impacted Mitchell. The conversation will emphasize the importance of Mitchell’s letters and personal archives, offering insight into how the second-wave feminist movement provided her with new frameworks to understand her own artistic trajectory and her position within the art world. It will also invite reflection on how feminist methodologies in art historical research can shed light on a complex and now famous figure.
The discussion will be preceded by an introduction by Sarah Roberts, Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation and co-curator of the landmark retrospective Joan Mitchell, organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The panel will feature four distinguished speakers, Cora Chalaby, Flavia Frigeri, Julia Marchand, and Grazina Subelyte. It will be moderated by AWARE’s founder, art historian and curator Camille Morineau.
Throughout the event, documentary films on Joan Mitchell by Angeliki Haas and Marion Cajori will be screened on loop. The evening will conclude with an informal cocktail reception to celebrate Mitchell and her enduring legacy.
Pratical information
Wednesday, October 1, 2025, from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Free entry with registration here
The event will be held in English
Cora Chalaby is a PhD Candidate in History of Art at University College London. Her research explores American late modernist painting by women artists, focusing on the work of Joan Mitchell, Alma Thomas, and Helen Frankenthaler. Cora was a Fall 2023 Visiting Scholar at Yale University. She holds a BA in History of Art from the University of Cambridge and an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Contemporary Painting and The Burlington Magazine. Cora’s forthcoming publications include an article in the Fall 2025 issue of the Archives of American Art Journal and a chapter for The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Painting. She has been awarded major research grants including from the Terra Foundation for American Art, Getty Library and University College London.
Dr Flavia Frigeri is Curatorial and Collections Director at the National Portrait Gallery. Previously she served as the CHANEL Curator for the Collection at the NPG, leading a major partnership project supported by the CHANEL Culture Fund. From 2016 to 2020 she was a Lecturer on modern and contemporary art at University College London. Previously she was Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, where she co-curated The World Goes Pop (2015), and was responsible for Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (2014), Paul Klee: Making Visible (2013) and Ruins in Reverse (2013). She has recently guest curated the retrospective of French-Portuguese artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, the group exhibition Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction, 1950-1970 (2024) at Turner Contemporary in Margate and All Our Todays (2025), a survey of international contemporary art at MARe in Bucharest, Romania. She has published articles and catalogue essays on post-war Italian art, feminism, exhibition histories and pop art and is the author of Pop Art and Women Artists both in Thames & Hudson’s Art Essentials series and the co-editor of a volume of collected essays, New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms (Routledge, 2021).
Julia Marchand is a Venice-based curator, researcher. Her main fields of research are related to adolescent aesthetics within visual arts as well editorial and poetic activities of Ilia Zdanevich (1894-1975), who was recently the subject of the Georgian pavilion at the 60th edition of the International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, which she curated. Curator at the Vincent Van Gogh Foundation between 2015 and 2023, she has conceived, alongside Bice Curiger, many exhibitions, most recently Action / Gesture / Painting: Women in Abstraction, a World History, 1940-1970 (2023). Artistic director of Extramentale, Julia Marchand has worked with the artists Saradibiza, Anaïs-Tohé Commaret, Mohamed Bourouissa, and Lisa Yuskavage. In 2020, she organized a symposium on the carnival at the Centre Pompidou with Claire Tancons, Paul B. Preciado, Jenkin v. Zyl, Mathis Collins and Jean-Baptiste Carobolante. She is currently preparing an exhibition on Ilia Zdanevich and Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise at the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare (Bolzano, Italy) as well as a series of podcasts for Projets Media. She is also guest curator of the Prix Rubis Mécénat x Beaux-Arts de Paris and the spokesperson for Xie Lei for the Prix Marcel Duchamp this year.
Julia Marchand trained in London (Goldsmiths, University of London), India (Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal) and France (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne).
Camille Morineau, heritage curator and art historian specialising in women artists is the co-founder of AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions. With degrees from both the École normale supérieure and the Institut national du patrimoine, Camille Morineau has worked for twenty years in public cultural institutions in France, including ten years as curator of the contemporary collections at the musée national d’Art moderne – Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris). She curated numerous exhibitions there, including Yves Klein (2006), Gerhard Richter (2012), Roy Lichtenstein (2013), and the hanging elles@centrepompidou (2009-2011) dedicated solely to female artists from the collections of the musée national d’Art moderne. She has also curated several exhibitions as a free-lance curator, including Niki de Saint Phalle at RMN – Grand Palais (Paris, 2014) and Guggenheim Bilbao (2016), Ceramix. From Rodin to Schütte, about the use of ceramics by artists of the 20th and 21st century, at Bonnefanten Museum Maastricht (2015) and La maison rouge, Fondation Antoine de Galbert, with Manufacture de Sèvres (Paris, 2016). From 2016 to October 2019, she was the director of exhibitions and collections at Monnaie de Paris, where she curated the following exhibitions: Women House, also shown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington (2017-2018), Floor-naments, an exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou (2017), Subodh Gupta (2018), Thomas Schütte (2019), Kiki Smith (2019-2020). In 2021, she curated the first French retrospective of Françoise Pétrovitch at the Fonds Hélène & Édouard Leclerc in Landerneau, Brittany. In 2022, she co-curated Pionnières with Lucia Pesapane at the musée du Luxembourg in Paris.
Gražina Subelytė, PhD, is Associate Curator at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Her recent exhibitions include Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity (2022, with Museum Barberini, Potsdam), 1948: The Biennale of Peggy Guggenheim (2018), and Rita Kernn-Larsen: Surrealist Paintings (2017). Besides, she co-curated Peggy Guggenheim: The Last Dogaressa (2019–20) and From Gesture to Form: Postwar European and American Art from the Schulhof Collection (2019). Among other projects, she is currently co-organizing a show Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector (2026-27, with Royal Academy of Arts, London), and an exhibition on Hedda Sterne. Gražina co-authored the new handbook of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (2024) and authored the catalogue of the Schulhof Collection of art after 1945. She wrote numerous essays on modern and contemporary art, and has lectured at institutions such as the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museum Barberini, Potsdam; Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki; Northwestern University; University of Edinburgh; La Biennale di Venezia; and Accademia delle Scienze, Turin. Gražina completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Gražina sits on the Advisory Boards of Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, MO Museum in Vilnius, and the Seligmann Center, New York. Also, she is part of the Visionary Circle of The Warburg Institute in London.