Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill in Massachusetts presents Twenty Years in Truro (Selected Paintings 1989-2025), a solo exhibition of paintings by San Francisco Bay Area artist Mitchell Johnson, on view September 3–14, 2025. This is Johnson’s fifth exhibition at Castle Hill, where he teaches a master color class every September.
There have been three watershed moments in Mitchell Johnson’s 45-year painting career: the first, a work trip to France in 1989, the second, his move from New York City to Palo Alto, California in 1990, and the third, an initial painting trip to Cape Cod in 2005. In his own words:
“I followed a very strong hunch that what I needed in 1989 was to leave graduate school and paint alone in France. It was all my idea, all my doing. In 1990, I was offered a chance to work in the studio of Sam Francis in Palo Alto, California. I didn’t want to leave NYC. I called Sol LeWitt on the phone, hoping he would say that I could join the Wall Drawing Team and stay in NYC. Instead he convinced me that I should move to California. In 2005, the art dealer Sally Munson invited me to visit Chatham, MA, to produce local work for a show she was curating of my European landscapes. My first paintings of Truro, paintings which changed my trajectory, were made because of Sally. Life, especially life in the art world, is an interesting combination of the things you pursue and the things that come your way. California fell into my lap. Truro fell into my lap.”
Johnson’s 20 years of annual painting trips to Cape Cod started in May 2005, immediately after he saw the historic Giorgio Morandi and Josef Albers exhibit in Bologna, Italy. He arrived on the Cape at a pivotal moment when his paintings were becoming less brushy, less impressionistic, more about large areas of flat color using familiar, even iconic, motifs to comment on color relativity. The range of work on view in the 2025 survey at Castle Hill illustrates the importance of this first stay on the Cape, examining the impact of North Truro motifs on all of his paintings. It features early Truro works borrowed from the Cape Cod Museum of Art, including “Truro n. 6” (2005), which appeared in two feature films by Nancy Meyers: The Holiday (2009) and Crazy Stupid Love (2011). The show also includes paintings from New York, Europe, California, New England, and Newfoundland.
Art critic Donald Kuspit reviewed Johnson’s paintings three times, including in a 2023 Whitehot Magazine article:
“Johnson is a master of abstraction, as his oddly constructivist paintings show, but of unconscious feeling, for his geometry serves to contain and with that control the strong feelings implicit in his strong colors. Apart from that, his paintings are art historically important, because they seamlessly fuse abstraction and realism, which Kandinsky tore apart to the detriment of both even as he recognized that they were implicitly inseparable, tied together in a Gordian knot, as they masterfully are in Johnson’s paintings.”
About the Artist
Mitchell Johnson began painting in the late 1970s as a teenager at Staten Island Academy. He received his MFA from Parsons School of Design in 1990 and also studied painting, drawing, and art history at the Washington Studio School and Randolph-Macon College. His paintings are in the permanent collections of over 35 museums. He has appeared on TV programs in France (BFM Nice), Italy (Generazione Bellezza), and Monaco (Monaco InfoTV). He has been a visiting artist at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, Borgo Finocchieto, and the LeWitt House in Praiano, Italy.
About the Exhibition
Twenty Years in Truro (Selected Paintings 1989-2025) is on view September 3–14 at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
- Artist Reception: Thursday, September 4, 4–6pm (ET)
- Artist Talk: Friday, September 5, 3:00–3:30pm (ET)
For more information, visit mitchelljohnson.com and follow him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
Additionally, Johnson’s exhibition of Paris paintings at Flea Street in Menlo Park, California, has been extended through September 18.
