Roscoe Mitchell: Ra Shu

Roscoe Mitchell (b. 1940) has been a major figure in creative music for over five decades. His work as a visual artist, which has run parallel to his pioneering work in performance, is just coming to public attention. Ra Shu, Mitchell’s first exhibition on the West Coast, presents nearly 50 paintings made in the last two years in the large space at The Pit. Working in early morning sessions at his home outside of Madison, Wisconsin, Mitchell has extended and refined a visual vocabulary that includes both pattern-oriented abstraction – often including wrinkles in the regularity of the repetitions or juxtapositions that buzz and crackle – and figurative-narrative scenarios drawn from his imagination. Paintings like “The Hypnotist,” “The Chaperone,” and “United States Marshall” introduce a cast of specific but mysterious characters sporting fabulous outfits made of spectacularly designed fabrics. These contrasting and complementary components mirror aspects of his music, which ranges from arch seriousness to knee-slapping humor. A number of the works feature variable orientations, some of them designed to be shown in rotation. The works also range in scale, from small intricate panels to four-foot square canvases, but they share a common color amplitude that is jacked up to a point that its vibrations are nearly explosive. 

Born and raised in Chicago, Mitchell formed the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble in 1966, featuring Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors. Three years later, adding Joseph Jarman, upon their departure to Paris for a two-year sojourn the group transformed into the collective interdisciplinary troupe called the Art Ensemble of Chicago. By that time Mitchell had already recorded the first LP of music affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Sound (Delmark, 1966), and he had joined forces with St. Louis trumpeter Bowie for Numbers 1 & 2 (Nessa, 1967), which featured a painting by Mitchell on its cover. Mitchell had been painting since 1963, and he continued on and off into the heyday of the Art Ensemble and through a hyperproductive sequence of decades of solo music, improvised encounters, and music for Mitchell-led ensembles. Another Mitchell painting graced the cover of the Art Ensemble’s LP The Third Decade (ECM, 1985); that work is now in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Although he continued to compose, Mitchell was afforded time off-road by the pandemic, a period in which he began painting avidly again. This new activity has not kept him from his musical works, which have continued to flourish.