Joyce Pensato never met a Mickey Mouse she couldn’t disfigure. The late painter—known for turning pop culture’s most recognizable cartoon faces into dripping, manic images—found a rich terrain, both emotionally and formally, in the on-screen realm. The Brooklyn native’s canvases were always loud, even when rendered in black and white. She wielded enamel with a masterful edge, distilling the iconography of mass culture into something as grotesque as it was human.
Six years after her death at the age of 78, the ICA Miami has organized an expansive posthumous survey, opening on December 2 and on view through March 15. The show brings together more than 65 works spanning five decades, from her earliest Batman sketches to the explosive enamel paintings that defined her late era.
“We wanted to bring renewed attention to Joyce’s critical place in American art history,” ICA Art + Research Center Director Gean Moreno tells CULTURED. “Her practice intersects Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and a uniquely personal visual language, yet she has often been overlooked in canonical narratives.” Leading the charge are the ICA’s artistic director, Alex Gartenfeld; curator Stephanie Seidel; and Moreno.
Gartenfeld first worked with the artist in 2013, commissioning murals that traveled to Rome and Paris. Then, in 2017, the trio invited Pensato to create a site-specific installation for the museum’s “The Everywhere Studio” exhibition, which explored the significance of the artistic sanctum. This year’s show, the most comprehensive presentation of her work to date, unfolds across character-themed rooms—featuring The Simpsons, South Park, Mickey Mouse, and Batman. (“I see him as strength and real power. I tried to do Spider-Man but he looked like a ballerina!” she once told New American Paintings of the caped crusader.)
Beyond the cartoon veneer lies a painter deeply engaged with the history of abstraction. Early oil work from the 1980s reveal the influence of her mentor, Joan Mitchell, with broad slashes of color and flurries of energy. As Pensato’s confidence grew, so too did her wit. “We kept circling back to the tension Joyce draws between humor and darkness,” Seidel says. “On the surface, her subjects are familiar cultural icons, but she pushes them into a psychological terrain where comedy dissolves into tragedy.”
Her influence, the curators posit, can be felt in the work of a generation of artists such as Sean Landers and Cosima von Bonin. In their gestures, whether painted or performed, one senses the echo of Pensato’s insistence that art can—and should—simultaneously entertain, disturb, and illuminate the complications of contemporary life.
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