Event Information

Mitchell Johnson: Twenty-One Years in Truro (Selected Paintings 1988-2026)
Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill presents Twenty-One Years in Truro (Selected Paintings 1988-2026), a solo exhibition of paintings by Mitchell Johnson, September 8-20, 2026. An artist reception will be held Thursday, September 10, from 4:00-6:00 pm. This is Johnson's sixth solo exhibition at Castle Hill, where he has taught an annual master color class since 2020.
Castle Hill is pleased to present an exhibition of Mitchell Johnson's recent paintings in its gallery at 10 Meetinghouse Road in Truro. The exhibition includes recent paintings alongside several never-before-exhibited early Truro works and Johnson's first New England painting, Fall (Tabor Academy), painted in 1988 while he was a graduate student at Parsons School of Design in New York. The exhibition also includes paintings from California, New York, France, and Italy, placing the Truro paintings within the broader context of Johnson's fifty year career.
Johnson's annual painting trips to Cape Cod began in May 2005, immediately after he visited the landmark Giorgio Morandi/Josef Albers exhibition at Museo Morandi in Bologna, Italy. He arrived on the Outer Cape at a pivotal moment in his development, when his paintings were becoming less brush-driven and increasingly focused on large, distinct areas of color. Truro proved to be an ideal setting for this shift, with its bands of sky, water, dune, road, and shadow offering a naturally simplified visual structure. Johnson's paintings use familiar and often iconic motifs as a means of exploring color relativity, perception, and visual experience.
Although Johnson has continued to travel and paint extensively in California, France, New York, and elsewhere, the work produced in Truro occupies a special place within his larger body of work. These paintings reveal an artist returning repeatedly to the same location, not in search of novelty, but in pursuit of greater clarity. Like Monet returning to Rouen Cathedral or Morandi returning to the same bottles and boxes, Johnson has used repetition as a means of discovery.
Truro remains central to Johnson's work because its distinctive topography-bands of sky, dune, road, cottage, shadow, and water-provides an ideal structure for his ongoing investigation of color relativity and perception. The Outer Cape is where Johnson's long-standing interest in landscape intersects most clearly with ideas about color informed by Josef Albers.
Public Programs
Artist Reception
Thursday, September 10, 2026
4:00-6:00 pm
Artist Talk
Friday, September 11, 2026
3:00-3:30 pm
About the Artist
Mitchell Johnson began painting 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 more than forty museums, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Crocker Art Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Tampa Museum of Art, Museo Morandi in Bologna, and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome. His work has been featured on television in France (BFM Nice), Italy (RAI 3's Generazione Bellezza), and Monaco (Monaco Info). He has been a visiting artist at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, Borgo Finocchieto in Tuscany, and the Sol LeWitt House in Praiano, Italy.
The Gallery at Truro Center for the Arts is open Monday through Friday, 10:00 am-4:00 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 12:00-4:00 pm.
Additional information is available at www.mitchelljohnson.com. Follow Johnson on Instagram @mitchell_johnson_artist. A PDF catalog of available paintings by email request: Mitchell.catalog@gmail.com.
Interview and image requests: Cherie Mittenthal cherie@castlehill.org
A new 96-page book, Mitchell Johnson: Twenty-One Years in Truro, accompanies the exhibition and will be available through Truro Center for the Arts beginning September 7, 2026.

Date and Time: Tuesday, 08 September 2026 at 10:00 - Sunday, 20 September 2026 at 16:00

Category: Arts | Visual Arts | Galleries / Art

Artist: Mitchell Johnson