Double Ziggurat

Date1986

Credit LineArt History Department Fund

Dimensions22 x 30 in. (55.9 x 76.2 cm)

Object number1994.005.005

Label TextKatherine Mitchell was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1944. As a teenager she knew she wanted to be an artist, and hearing a lecture by Lamar Dodd inspired her to attend the University of Georgia. From there she moved to the Atlanta College of Art as a Ford Foundation Scholar and studied with (and later married) Ed Ross, the great advocate of Minimalism. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1968, and later earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1977 from Georgia State University. From 1985 until her retirement in 2009, she taught painting in the Visual Arts Program at Emory University.

While Mitchell's style has always been grounded in the abstract and geometric, her art has undergone a continual process of evolution as she incorporates new experiences into her work. Following an insight made while climbing the stairs of the Whitney Museum in New York in 1981, she began to base her paintings and drawings on architecture, often inspired by the buildings of antiquity. The Carlos Museum's lithograph Double Ziggurat of 1986 refers to the stepped pyramids of ancient Mesopotamia. Mitchell here constructs two half-pyramids, first, by conceiving each level as a series of square modules and then, filling in each level with black, gray, and terracotta bands stacked atop one another. The two ziggurats are almost mirror images, except for the additional black segments on the left, relieving potential monotony by varying the rhythm of color.
Exhibition HistoryStyle and Technique: Prints from the Collection of the Carlos Museum, Michael C. Carlos Museum, January 18 - May 4, 1997
Artists in Georgia: Contemporary Works from the Collection, Michael C. Carlos Museum, February 6 - May 16, 2010
Published ReferencesGeorgia Masterpieces: Selected Works from Georgia's Museums (Atlanta: Georgia Council for the Arts, 2009), 61.

ProvenancePurchased by Emory University Art History Department for MCCM from Rolling Stone Press, Atlanta, Georgia.

Status

Not on view

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