Joni Mitchell: An intersectional retrospective
Design by: Emily Hu
Description: A blue and orange image, the left half is Joni Mitchell in blackface on the cover of “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,” the right half is her with her long blond hair and a white dress.
Joni Mitchell is one of my favorite musicians. Her songs feel like a warm, sisterly hug; her lyrics have mentored me through my teenage and college years, and her wisdom has given me a roadmap for my soon-to-come real adulthood. “Both Sides Now” made the world cry in “Love Actually,” and “River” fills out the 1970s rock scene of “Almost Famous.” I fell in love with Mitchell after my brother did. He introduced me to her music, and he now owns her entire discography on vinyl. He says her song “The Gallery” reminds him of me, as I am a bit of a melancholic artist myself. I’ll always cherish the memories of my brother and me screaming “California” while cruising down the San Diego roads as the sun set over the mountains. What sprang from this whistle-toned woman singing on any stage she could nab was an illustrious, 11-time Grammy Award-winning, iconic, genre-bending, and impactful female musician. Spanning 19 studio albums, many collaborations, and indelible lyrics, AllMusic said it best: “Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century.”
Getting deeper into Mitchell’s career, I stumbled upon a strange and unsettling occurrence: “Art Nouveau.” No, not the art movement of the late 19th century, but Joni Mitchell wearing blackface. Her “character,” a smooth-talking, jazz-playing Black man, was named “Art Nouveau.” She would attend parties and perform as Art, and even appeared on the cover of her 1977 album, “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,” wearing the bizarre and offensive disguise.
Image: “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” album cover
Image Description: From left to right, Mitchell wearing her “Art Nouveau” blackface persona, Mitchell as herself, smiling and posing, a child in profile
Why did Joni, a woman who was a beacon of feminism and women’s rights, plummet toward racist caricature? What was her reasoning behind the disguise? Does it even matter? How do I, a die-hard fan, rectify this egregious sin with her wider career, a career that has changed my outlook on life, womanhood, and relationships forever? Can we separate the art from the artist? Should we? Or is obfuscating an artist’s mistakes both lazy and unproductive to the consumer? In this retrospective, I aim to create a measured response and analysis of Mitchell’s “Art Nouveau” stunt while also examining my own adoration of the artist, in turn auditing my own ability (or lack there of) to “separate the art from the artist,” and possibly instead include her aberrations in my understanding of a cultural figure, to not be blinded by love and instead be better informed by disgust.
Joni Mitchell, From the Beginning
Born in Canada in 1943, Mitchell made a name for herself immediately, singing traditional folk songs on any coffeehouse or bar stage in Calgary that would let her. After becoming pregnant at 21 by a man who fled to California upon the news, Joni moved back to Toronto, alone and embarrassed, and was inspired to start writing music. She then left Canada for California’s idyllic Laurel Canyon, and came to define a generation of 1960s and ‘70s counterculture with anticapitalist, anti-war hits like “Big Yellow Taxi” and “The Fiddle and the Drum.” Her debut album, “Song to a Seagull,” was released in 1968. The work is a deeply introspective, exploratory, and haunting album that Joni had worked her whole life to create. A concept album divided between urban life and coastal beauty, “Song to a Seagull” includes songs like “Night in the City” and the title track, which depict a woman torn between the allure of a potentially alienating urban life and the charm of nature’s freedom. The album features intricate and innovative guitar tunings, a keystone of Mitchell’s later career, and her deep, regal voice makes “I Had a King” and “Michael From Mountains” lyrical, nostalgic fairy tales. The 10-track album sees a woman finding her place in an industry and a world dominated by patriarchy.
Her follow-up, “Clouds,” which debuted in 1969, is a significant if not underrated turning point in Mitchell’s career. More confident in her delivery, Mitchell begins to define herself not as a dainty-voiced folk musician but as a nuanced and assertive artist playing with form and genre. “Both Sides Now, from “Clouds, is a keystone track of Mitchell’s career. The song tells the story of an aging woman who regrets her past and laments her future. Its mature and tragic lyrics represent the outside pressures of motherhood and domesticity placed on women. Freewheeling and floating, “Clouds” was a milestone in feminist music in the canon of 1960s folk-rock music, even if Joni already deliberately distanced herself from the “folk” label by its release. At the time, Ben Fong-Torres wrote in Rolling Stone, “Joni Mitchell is a fresh, incredibly beautiful innocent/experienced girl/woman”; Mitchell would make the rest of her career an indictment of that conception of her. She was not the virginal, angelic singer of men’s dreams: she was a revolutionary, her voice growing huskier with each passing year.
1970 brought the world “Ladies of the Canyon,” an album that sees Mitchell embracing place, literally and metaphorically. California’s Laurel Canyon becomes a character, its women — Trina, Annie, and Estrella — etched into the title track like a mythologized feminist commune. “Ladies” is more instrumentally complex (adding rhythmic percussion from Mitt Holland and deep cello from Teresa Adam’s), foreshadowing her turn away from pure folk. The album ends with a trio of legendary tracks: “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock,” and “The Circle Game,” which have been immortalized by rock radio but deserve a feminist rereading. Her version of “Woodstock” is not a full celebration— it’s haunted, pulsing with melancholy, a critique of counterculture’s illusions. Mitchell’s feminism was always thorny and idiosyncratic, but this is where she began to stage herself less as a chronicler of romance and more as a seer, one foot in the movement and the other watching it crumble.
“Blue” is the earthquake. Mitchell is turned inside out, revealing all the fragile flesh beneath her. Her confessional style, though often weaponized against her by male critics who deemed her “too emotional,” is her feminist legacy. Songs like “Little Green” and “A Case of You” are melancholic memories decorated with love that document maternal grief, emotional labor, and the uneven terms of heterosexual relationships. When she sings the holiday song “River,” lyrics like “I wish I had a river/I could skate away on” and “I’m going to make a lot of money/ Then I’m going to quit this crazy scene,” morphs the song from celebration to escape, Mitchell yearning to flee a world that refuses to make space for women to feel anything but jolly. “Blue” weaponizes female vulnerability. Its quiet, folky melodies and trilling vocals are its power. In an industry dominated by male voices screaming for attention, Mitchell only has to whisper to make the world lean closer.
From 1972 to 1976, Mitchell released four albums: “For the Roses,” “Court and Spark,” “The Hissing of Summer Lawns,” and “Hejira.” Post-“Blue,” Mitchell continues to explore her genre’s limitations. The resulting music was more textured, with notes of jazz and brass heightening the acoustic folk tone into a hybrid musical realm. “For the Roses” is often ignored, but it deserves attention for how it captures the fallout of relationships after fame on tracks like “Woman of Heart and Mind.” “For the Roses” sees Mitchell examine artistic self-surveillance, watching your image become myth, and trying to write through the distortion. “Court and Spark” flirts with pop accessibility and is more glossy, lush, and jazz-infused than any of her previous work. Sharp feminist critiques are nestled within radio-friendly jams like “Help Me.” “Free Man in Paris” unpacks the gendered exhaustion of fame, and “People’s Parties” highlights the emotional isolation women face in elite circles. Mitchell begins to favor cultural analysis instead of confessional songwriting, using her learned poise to make the heartbreak sting sharper.
“The Hissing of Summer Lawns” came out in 1975, marking the true beginning of Mitchell’s experimental phase. This album remains one of the most controversial in her catalogue. She critiques suburban life, the commodification of beauty, and the empty rituals of upper-class womanhood. Tracks like “Edith and the Kingpin” weave story-songs that indict patriarchy without sermonizing. Her use of polyrhythms, synthesizers, and field recordings challenged what a female singer-songwriter can sound like. “Hejira” is, to me, Mitchell’s second greatest album. Mitchell leaves behind not just lovers but genres. “Hejira” is her most nomadic album: composed on the road and informed by movement, restlessness, and alienation. The basslines, guided by jazz musician Jaco Pastorius, are like shadows following Mitchell’s gravelly, cigarette-infused voice. This is the sound of a woman aging and still searching. On “Amelia,” she communes with Earhart as a symbol of female escape. “Song for Sharon” ruminates on the cost of independence, artistic freedom, and societal scrutiny. “Hejira” is about holding all emotions in as one reckons with the questions of aging, change, and growth. It is sublime, sparse, and exhausted.
The Feminist Roots and Limits of Folk Music
Folk music is known as the music for social change; stripped-back instrumentation and lyric-forward arrangements offer a direct line between artist and listener, album and movement. For women, especially in the 1960s and ‘70s, folk music became a rare platform to express autonomy, rage, desire, and doubt in ways rarely explored by 1950s mainstream pop. Joni Mitchell, alongside figures like Joan Baez and Judy Collins (and later Tracy Chapman), redefined what was possible for female songwriters. Women were no longer singing the backing vocals for auteur artists like Johnny Cash or Bing Crosby; they were singularly minded, standing alone on stage with a guitar and a story. Mitchell’s songs chronicled not just the foibles of love but deeper truths about adoption and pregnancy, living alone, and the rich culture of her Los Angeles neighborhood. Folk was home to protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Civil Rights advocacy, and the growing second wave of feminism. Through personalized lyrics on contemporary anxieties, folk introduced voices that resonated deeply.
The rise of Mitchell mirrors the rise of folk. Initially discounted, eventually embraced, and ever-changing in attitude and importance. After moving to the States, Mitchell put up her child for adoption, a choice that was examined in tracks like “Little Green” years after she made it. It was a radical thing to admit to the world in the 1960s. In California, Mitchell experimented more in her love life. Author Sheila Whiteley said: “[Mitchell’s] lovers are characterized in transience…. She chooses men who will not stop her from her prime purpose, which is to explore the planet and life.” This freedom enabled Mitchell’s mission to create music for all, music that reached all corners of life. Mitchel even cited a story of a “Black, blind pianist” who told her her music was “raceless” and “genderless.” It is debatable how successful this mission was. The scene that elevated her was, consciously or not, built on racial exclusion, particularly of Black women.
While folk music opened doors for white women to explore and express their authenticity, it was deeply rooted in white supremacist standards of purity that marginalized Black women, who were stereotyped as aggressively sexual and dominant. Folk music’s authenticity was measured by how raw or untrained a voice sounded, a measure that excluded Black artists unless they conformed to the expectations of white listeners. Mitchell’s journey exemplifies this tension, initially embodying the gentle, untrained, and “pure” sound that folk music valorized, which aligned with traditional stereotypes. However, as her career progressed, she became more assertive in her music, critiquing misogyny within the industry and challenging the very stereotypes she once conformed to. This shift reveals a complex negotiation: on one hand, her assertiveness subverts the passive, angelic femininity that folk music historically celebrated; on the other, her initial adherence to certain vocal and aesthetic norms can be conformed to the genre, norms that excluded Black women and upheld problematic stereotypes. Her evolving artistry is both challenged and shaped by the cultural frameworks within which she emerged.
This makes her Art Nouveau character all the more confounding. Mitchell, who had built a career championing women’s inner lives and resisting traditional binaries, chose to don blackface and perform as a fictional Black man, a “cool,” jazz-inclined alter ego she claimed embodied a freer version of herself. Art Nouveau co-opted Blackness for aesthetic and symbolic gain without accountability. For an artist so committed to mapping the emotional terrain of womanhood and self-reinvention, it’s devastating that she failed to see how deeply racist and damaging this performance was. Rather than transcend race and gender, Mitchell’s choice revealed how easily whiteness convinces itself it has the right to try.
Blackface as “Art Nouveau”: What the Hell Was She Thinking?
By the mid-1970s, Joni Mitchell had outgrown the folk label, and she resented it. Folk had become a sonic and cultural box, especially for women. Mitchell saw folk tethering her to an image of the “pretty blond girl with a guitar,” a muse of pastoral innocence. This commercially successful image left her voiceless in a rock industry dominated by men and tabloids that grouped women artists into gendered silos. Jazz offered her an escape: a way to stretch musically, intellectually, and emotionally. Inspired by Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, Mitchell’s leap into jazz fusion was alienating to some fans but exhilarating to others. “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” and “Hejira” offered textured critiques of suburbia, patriarchy, and racial difference through rhythmic complexity and lyrical ambiguity, but also saw the uprooting of African instruments from their culture without care. In many ways, however, this genre turn was a necessary rebellion against the confines of folk femininity and white liberal politics. Jazz, with its improvisational freedom, rich voices, and intertwined Black lineage, gave her a new language and form. But this artistic awakening came with a deep contradiction: her performance of blackface on the cover of her 1977 album “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” and in public appearances thereafter.
Mitchell’s “explanation” for Art is riddled with troubled reasoning and a misunderstanding of intersectionality. She claimed the character, a swaggering, street-wise Black man who wore dark shades and a bushy mustache, allowed her to embody a freer, more confident self in a male-dominated world. What she didn’t understand is that in a white male-dominated world, adopting the identity of a Black man is nothing short of minstrel. She wore Art as armor, a costume she believed gave her license to escape gender norms and gain cultural legitimacy, to stop being seen as a “girl singer” and start being viewed as an auteur. While correct in her belief that masculinity lends mystique and respect to male musicians, her use of Black masculinity as a metaphoric shield against misogyny is not only offensive and ahistorical but grossly exploitative. Donning her mask, she treated Blackness as a tool, a costume, a means to an artistic end, rather than a lived identity shaped by historical oppression and cultural tradition.
Her defenders (or, at least, justifiers) point to her relationships with Black men, her love for jazz, and her critique of white suburbia and invasive capitalism in earlier albums as evidence of solidarity. These are not excuses for blackface. There is no excuse for publicly calling Rubin “Hurricane” Carter the N-word after being booed off stage for sounding, in the eyes of incarcerated Black men, like a whitewashed version of jazz. Nothing justifies the notion that racial impersonation could earn her “honorary” admission to a genre or a canon that sidelined women and, as she believed under false pretenses, idolized “Black cool.” Black musicians were made “cool” by Black people, and assuming that Blackness includes an innate sense of musical prowess or mythical suaveness is as racist as saying all Black folks are good at basketball. Mitchell wanted to critique whiteness and gender norms, but instead of breaking the system, she adopted its worst habits, mimicking the very cultural fantasies she once exposed.
Mitchell’s portrayal of “Art Nouveau” in “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” was, in part, a bid for protection against the twin exposures of exploitation: the commodification of rock music and the fetishization of white womanhood. In the economy of the 1970s celebrity, those currencies came with the cost of being seen, sold, and circulated in ways that she could not fully control. Asked if her divergences would cause her to “lose” the vulnerability that had endeared her to audiences, Mitchell laughed in response to interviewer Malka Marom: “I don’t want to be vulnerable anymore!” Critical readings that frame her “Don Juan” self-representation as a “transformation into a virtual male,” seen by Mitchell more as drag than masquerade, rest on an essential, faulty premise: that masculinity, especially Black masculinity, is defined by steely self-possession and a lack of vulnerability. This assumption not only flattens the emotional breadth of Black male artistry but also erases the long history of tenderness, pain, and interiority present in jazz, blues, and soul. In seeking to reframe herself through new musical and visual idioms, Mitchell was attempting to negotiate in an industry that rewarded a narrow spectrum of femininity while punishing its transgression. Art’s framework fails because it reproduces the very racial and gendered stereotypes it claims to analyze, substituting cliché costume for actual nuance.
Can We Separate Art From the Artist? More Importantly, Should We?: My Journey With Joni
The call to “separate the art from the artist” has always frustrated me as an artist myself. I hope that my work reflects my culture, upbringing, and identity, and maybe gives someone out there something to see themselves in. I have always enjoyed interpreting art this way, sometimes to the annoyance of an art history or film professor. The separation is often framed as a defense of personal enjoyment, or even as a statement that art lives in a separate, privileged place, separate from personal human failings. This is an easy way to avoid confronting the uncomfortable truths about the people we admire, shielding us from interpretations that inform us as ever-growing global citizens.
My knee-jerk reaction to seeing “Art Nouveau” was to, well, forget about it. It was a blip in Joni’s decades-long musical history, a history that has meant many things to me, from mentorship to therapy to catharsis. But in this case, that separation started to feel not just incomplete, but dishonest. Her intense racism is not an unfortunate footnote in her career; it exists within her body of work, embedded in both the world that shaped her and the artistic lens through which she saw it. To acknowledge Mitchell’s genius without grappling with her failings is to miss the full scope of her art, and to diminish our own responsibility as listeners and cultural participants.
To claim that Mitchell’s use of blackface or her public use of the N-word were simply “mistakes of their time” is a careless excuse and a lazy interrogation. She was aware of the power of performance, yet did little to understand the histories she was appropriating for this twisted bastardization of drag. If anything, her creation of “Art Nouveau” demonstrates just how deliberate her use of racial masquerade was. By cloaking herself in the stereotyped image of a Black male pimp, Mitchell attempted to gain authority in a music industry that dismissed her femininity as trivial. But this authority came at the expense of real Black experiences, reducing them to costume and caricature, reducing storied Black struggle in the music industry to farce. The persona cannot be separated from her larger body of work; it was deliberately woven into her performances, her self-presentation, and even her defenses against sexism. To acknowledge Mitchell honestly and fully means grappling with how she used Black identity as a shield, while continuing to profit from a system that marginalizes Black artists.
Refusing to engage entirely with her work because of this also feels incomplete. Joni Mitchell, to many, is the matriarch of folk music, a visionary songwriter, and an artist who reshaped genre and history itself. Her influence runs through the work of Prince, Tracy Chapman, and countless other musicians who found in her music a language for vulnerability and sonic experimentation. To discard her oeuvre entirely would be to erase the complex ways she has shaped and was shaped by culture. The more challenging task is to hold both truths congruently: that her music remains deeply moving, and that her racism demands reckoning. In doing so, we resist the lazy comfort of separating the art from the artist, and instead take on the more human burden of seeing both beauty and harm as inseparable parts of Mitchell’s legacy.
Loving Joni Mitchell
Adoring the work of Joni Mitchell became much more complicated when I first saw “Art Nouveau.” I was confused, disgusted, and shocked; the artist I trusted and loved, who had taught me about everything from womanhood to California, was capable of such cruelty. “Blue” and “Hejira” are two of my favorite albums of all time, works of staggering beauty that have shaped not only my musical taste but the way I see myself as a painter and young woman. Her resilience after her strokes, her continued mentorship of young female musicians, and her sheer genius as a songwriter will never fail to inspire me. At the same time, her creation of “Art” and her willingness to wear blackface cannot and should not be erased. To claim that her music exists apart from her choices would be not only dishonest but anti-intellectual and lazy, an easy way out of wrestling with the contradictions inherent in loving someone who has done harm. But my love for her does not mean looking away. It means holding the beauty and the ugliness together, refusing to “separate” them and understanding that the real power of the art is not in its distance from its creator, but in the messy, human, deeply imperfect entanglement between them.
