Kelly’s multidisciplinary practice centers oral history and ancestral memory, real and imagined, woven into the fabric of the Africana Diaspora. Her work is deeply invested in labor intensive making, slowness, and home-spun passed down processes. Her current work in papermaking, textiles, and printmaking stems from ancestral origin points in the American South and Caribbean. Kelly’s practice references and constructs mythologies that find their roots in marronage, masquerade, and protective gestures of the Diaspora.
Kelly Taylor Mitchell is an artist and educator who lives and works in Atlanta, GA where she is currently a 2023-2024 Midtown Alliance Artist-in-Residence, a 2023-2024 Arts & Social Justice Fellow at Emory University, a 2023-2024 BIPOC Lyndon House Arts Foundation Fellow, and an Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College. Kelly is a 2022 Atlanta Artadia Awardee, a 2021-2022 SMFA at Tufts Travelling Fellow, the 2022 Inaugural Spelman College Affiliate Fellow at The American Academy in Rome and a 2020-2021 Working Artist Project Fellow at The Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia. She has completed residencies with Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Atlanta Contemporary. She has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, Virginia Commonwealth University, Penland School of Craft and Dieu Donne. Her work can be found in collections such as the Harvard Fine Arts Library, Duke University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Walker Art Center Library and in publications including Burnaway, Art Papers, and Hand Papermaking.