Joan Mitchell Oil

Joan Mitchell Oil on Canvas.  The signature has been verified with other verified Joan Mitchell works from the archives of Smith College where she was a student.
Mitchell used Mexican subject matter in many of her early works from her visits to Guanajuato, Mexico as a student.
From her Biography, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painted by Patricia Albers: "Excited by Guanajuato's abundance of "real" subject matter, Joan also used her sketchbook to work out ideas for paintings.  The focus on the urban underclass, particularly melancholy waifs, nuns, beggars, weeping woman, and nursing mothers...she isolated social types in an anesthetized vision of poverty, availing herself of stagy gestures and agitated drapery in a way that suggests modern dance as much as capitalist injustice.  Her use of chiaroscuro heightened the dramatic effect while simple horizon lines acted as framing devices and signaled barren landscapes and lives."
A striking oil on canvas from what I assume is the original frame.  This work is definitely a scene of poverty with a sense of agitation in the subjects.  Another part of this painting is a nod to her childhood with the chickens, a favorite art subject as a child.