Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four-decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell's inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and remarkable adeptness with color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time.

Sarah Roberts is the Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She previously served in progressive leadership roles in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the SFMOMA, and was most recently the Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture.

Saul Nelson is a Junior Research Fellow and Teaching Associate in History of Art at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. His first book, Never Ending: Modernist Painting Past and Future, was published by Yale University Press in 2024. His writing has appeared in Art History, American Art, Oxford Art Journal, New Left Review, Critical Inquiry, and The London Review of Books.

John Ashbery (1927-2017) was born in Rochester, New York. He was the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many other prizes and awards both nationally and internationally, he received a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama at the White House, in 2012.