Mitch Cope, b 1973 in Detroit, Michigan is a studio artist working in drawing, painting, video and sculpture since 1995. In addition to his solo studio practice Mitch has worked collaboratively with the Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, which fabricates sculptures from harvesting the infamously invasive, yet fascinating “Tree of Heaven, AKA Ghetto Palm” and Design 99, well known for large scale sculpture and painting installations based on personal social interactions and experiences from their Detroit neighborhood. He has won awards such as the Kresge Arts Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award and Juried Award from Art Prize 2012, among others. In 2010 he co-founded the non-profit Power House Productions which gained international attention for using sculpture, painting and architecture to radically transform a troubled neighborhood into an example of humanistic, arts based community development. In 2004 he travelled to Turkmenistan on a Cultural Envoy with the US state department to create an exhibition with local Turkmen landscape painters. He has worked as curator, from founding the Tangent Gallery, to working on the international art and design project Shrinking Cities and in 2007 he was part of the steering committee for the opening the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, acting as the assistant curator for its first three exhibitions.
He shows his work in the Detroit region and has shown nationally and internationally at such venues as the Smart Museum in Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts and Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Netherland, KunstWerke in Berlin and Kunsthalle in Dresden Germany.