Seminal Moments

An exhibition at the Museum of Art and Light in Kansas unpacks 40 years of poignant paintings by Dean Mitchell.

- Sarah Gianelli

Dean Mitchell grew up in the 1970s South, in an all-Black, working-class neighborhood in Quincy, Florida, not far from Tallahassee. He was raised by his grandmother and, for a time, his great-grandmother, whose death when he was 6 left an indelible imprint on him. Her sudden, not fully explained disappearance from the land of the living, taught him early on about life's fleetingness and loss.

"When my great-grandmother died, for a long time I didn’t understand where she went," he says. “What did ‘she went to heaven’ mean? All I knew is we never got to see her again and I never looked at life the same way...I never saw it as a permanent fixture. In my world people leave and you never see them again.”

The seeds for feelings of abandonment, and unworthiness, had already been planted by his mother and watered by his father. His mother got pregnant in college, the result of an affair with a married man who was also from Quincy. His mother fled to Pittsburgh while still pregnant with Mitchell, who she kept a secret from family and friends. When Mitchell's grandmother did find out, she insisted her daughter come back, finish college and she would raise the child, who was not quite a year old. His mother out of the picture, Mitchell grew up around the corner from the parents of his biological father, who, upon visits home, would not acknowledge Mitchell as his son, despite it being common knowledge in the town.