Who is Mitchell Schorr?

 

Mitchell Schorr, perhaps the best known urban mural painter in the world, has recently had art on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Mezzanine Gallery (part of the 2019 Play it Loud exhibition), in addition to the renowned Galerie Mourlot in New York These exhibitions follow recent exhibits in Hong Kong, Paris, Rome, London and Art Basel in Miami. New York foodies can also view Schorr’s art on the walls of David Burke’s restaurants.

Schorr’s Da Race mural series has been displayed at more than 100 locations worldwide -- and throughout NYC and Detroit -- inspiring the painting, Ice Cream Truck, currently on view and part of the permanent collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In 2017, Schorr painted Da Race to NYC live at Rockefeller Center for Ferrari's 70th anniversary after creating the Da Race to the East live in Hong Kong’s Lan Kwai Fong in 2015. Schorr has also muraled Da Race in Grand Rapids and Vermont after commissions by GM and the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy to paint Da Race on the Riverfront and GM's Headquarters at the Renaissance Center.

Schorr has painted 3-D murals in and around many of New York's parks for more than two decades. His murals have been featured in The New York Times,The Washington Post, Huffington Post, The Miami Herald, ArtNews, Details, MSNBC, WCBS, UPN 9, MSG Network on NY1’s New Yorker of the Week, Fox 5’s Good Day New York and in the movie New York, I Love You, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Christie.

Academics have also taken note of Schorr's New York murals. In "On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City" (University Press of Mississippi, 2009), authors Janet Braun-Reinitz, Amy Goodman, Jane Weissman write:

People enter, rather than view, Schorr's faraway landscapes, which literally envelop New York's distinctly urban parks (p. 163). Schorr, not content with one wall, looks at the total site. Every surface, fence, and pavement are potential components in his grand environmental schemes (p. 164). If not community murals in the strictest sense, Schorr's projects, characterized by loose brushwork and high color, invite thousands of New Yorkers into exotic, distant landscapes, far from their everyday concrete reality (p. 164).