Born in Chicago and educated at the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received a BFA (1947) and an MFA (1950), Joan Mitchell moved in 1949 to New York, where she was an active participant in the downtown arts scene. She began splitting her time between Paris and New York in 1955, before moving permanently to France in 1959. In 1968, Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris, while continuing to exhibit her work throughout the United States and Europe. It was in Vétheuil that she began regularly hosting artists at various stages of their careers, providing space and support to develop their art. When Mitchell passed away in 1992, her will specified that a portion of her estate should be used to establish a foundation to directly support visual artists. A Los Angeles-based art historian and critic, Suzanne Hudson is an associate professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California. A longtime contributor to Artforum, she is the author of books including Robert Ryman: Used Paint (2009) and Agnes Martin: Night Sea (2017). Mary Weatherford is forthcoming in 2019 from Lund Humphries and Contemporary Painting in 2020 by Thames & Hudson. Supported by a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she is pursuing research into the practical applications of art making for Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process, a study of the therapeutic origins of process within American modernism. Robert Slifkin is an associate professor of fine arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is the author of The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture between War and Peace, 1945-1975 (2019) and Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art (2013), which was awarded the Phillips Book Prize. His essays and reviews have appeared in such magazines and journals as Artforum, Art in America, Art Bulletin, Art Journal, October, Oxford Art Journal, and Racquet.