In 1992, a friend brought Joyce Pensato a rubber Mickey Mouse head scavenged from a garbage dump. Struck by the eerie expression of the toy, Pensato began painting and drawing it obsessively, stripping the Mouse of his cheer and reducing him to a few abstracted forms. In the resulting drawing, Untitled (1992), Mickey is barely a character at all, just two bulbous ears, a skull-like snout, and vacant, gazing eyes.
Over her career, Pensato spent decades dragging America’s cartoons into the abyss. Mickey’s cheerful grin disappears, Batman’s mask melts, and Felix the Cat looks startled and uneasy. These icons are rendered in quick, forceful strokes and thick drips of enamel. Using mostly black, white, silver, and gold, she took the shine of pop culture and ran it through her raw, expressive mark-making practice. The final images feel possessed: apparitions devoid of cheer, revealing something painful within.
Now, six years after her death at 78, ICA Miami has mounted the most ambitious presentation of Pensato’s work to date. On view through March 15, 2026, the eponymous retrospective assembles more than 65 works—from 1970s Batman drawings to her late-era, towering enamel paintings. The show offers the clearest view yet of a painter who saw the darkness of the cultural unconscious lurking behind pop’s cheeriest icons.
“Joyce Pensato” unfolds through a series of character-driven rooms that map Pensato’s obsessions. The exhibition opens with the 30-foot-long drawing Take Me to Your Leader (2018), a sprawling work featuring multiple warped versions of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. “Just walking into the room, it’s like a punch in the stomach,” Gean Moreno, curator of programs at ICA Miami, told Artsy. “It’s going to be super powerful, and as you go through, the intensity builds.”
Early life
Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Pensato first came to painting through an early interest in commercial art. She studied at the Art Students League before transferring to the New York Studio School in 1973. There, under the guidance of Mercedes Matter, she was pushed to pursue her gestural, image-driven approach. Around this time, she created her first charcoal drawings of comic-book characters—Spider-Man and Batman—some of which appear in the show.
Pensato’s first oil paintings carried hints of Joan Mitchell’s influence: muscular brushwork and flurries of color. Untitled (1980), featured at ICA Miami, leans toward landscape-like abstraction, built from broad fields of blues, yellows, and greens. But by 1990, she realized “the color was not working for me,” as she told the Brooklyn Rail.
By the early 1990s, she abandoned her vivid palette in favor of black-and-white enamel, a material Christopher Wool urged her to try. This shift marks the moment her voice fully clicked. In Untitled (Donald) (1991), Donald Duck emerges as a stark white silhouette against a black abyss, an apparition appearing to slip away into darkness.
How Joyce Pensato collected images
Pensato’s studio became a kind of reliquary, piled with toys and dolls rescued from dollar stores and sidewalks: a plush Cartman from South Park, a giant stuffed Bugs Bunny, and countless plastic Mickeys. These objects found their way into the paintings, distorted through vigorous brushstrokes and dripping enamel paint as she furiously reworked these characters.
In I Must Be Dreamin’ (2007), for instance, Felix the Cat appears less mischievous and more like a creature staring back at the viewer in shock. Elsewhere, Batman (1994) presents the hero as a blacked-out shape emerging from the dark, a presence built from shadows. Here, Batman absorbs post–Cold War paranoia into the silhouette of a vigilante protector.
Toward the end of the show, several artworks feature characters from The Simpsons, a family shaped by globalization and media saturation. Marge in Hell (2008), one of the show’s most disturbing images, depicts Marge possessed, her blue tower of hair resembling a tornado. By ripping these characters from their clean-lined origins, Pensato exposes the anxieties of American life that these cartoons were invented to soothe. Eyes bulge, outlines buckle, teeth emerge where smiles once sat. Familiar themes are turned into feral images.
“So much of the work comes from these strong, powerful gestures,” said Alex Gartenfeld, director of ICA Miami. “The visual complexity follows instantly in the drips—they’re an extension of the gesture itself. You feel both the physicality of the mark and the pull of gravity at the same time, which makes it seem like the artist is still right there. And because the enamel stays glossy and wet-looking, it’s as if the painting was made yesterday.”
Painting Mickey Mouse
Mickey Fried Up, 1990
Joyce Pensato
Hollis Taggart
Mickey Mouse is Pensato’s greatest muse. The earliest version featured in the show is Mary Ann’s Bambi (Mickey) (1989), a haunting charcoal drawing of the mouse. She painted nearly every version of him, from the early prototypes to the streamlined corporate star.
This show opens with a room devoted to Mickey that doubles as a timeline of Disney’s rise. Though it was unintentional, Pensato documents the industrialization of animation and the dominance of a single brand, as the image of Mickey unified into what we know today. “If you scratch just a little beneath the surface,” Moreno said, “there’s a whole regimentation of the industry of animation—it actually starts becoming a factory in the way American capitalism has built the factory, too.”
One work, Mr. Movie Star (2007), suggests polished celebrity, yet Mickey’s form appears worn down and partially eroded. The contradiction underscores how mass production can hollow out an icon’s meaning.
A long-overlooked legacy
Recognition came slowly for Pensato. She showed intermittently at group shows in New York, but it wasn’t until she was in her 60s that she had her first major New York solo show in 2007 at Petzel Gallery.
Pensato’s images grab you instantly: the scale, the energy, the strangeness of familiar faces pushed too far. But there’s more beneath the surface, an undercurrent of what she experienced in the world channeled through these cultural icons. “If you look at it straight on, you see this expressive gestural painting with all the psychological charge it has, that’s absolutely correct,” Moreno explained. “But if you take a little side step and you start looking at the social landscapes that these characters come from, then the second dimension totally opens up.”
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