Donna Mintz (born Gainesville, Georgia, 1956) is a visual artist who writes about art and literature. Her painting and installation is a meditation on memory, time, and place. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of such institutions as the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and in public and private collections internationally. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Sewanee Review, Sculpture magazine, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, SWING, and the arts journals Burnaway.org and ArtsATL.org. She recently published her first book, Stars at Noon (Mercer University Press, 2026), inspired by the life and work of the writer James Agee.
Mintz is a past writer-in-residence at Rivendell Writers’ Colony, the Lillian E. Smith Center, and a fellow at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, for which she co-wrote and co-edited The Hambidge Center: 80 Years in the Making (2014), a book celebrating its 80-year history as an artists’ residency. She holds an MFA from Sewanee’s School of Letters at the University of the South, and resides in Atlanta, Georgia where she maintains her studio practice.
Sensuality, poetry, intellect beam from Donna Mintz’s golden Ex Astris
The stunning gold-leafed spectacle and deeply poetic work in Donna Mintz’s Ex Astris, at Sandler Hudson Gallery through May 4, recalls great moments of art history ... read more here.
Ten years ago in a cabin at the edge of the Cumberland Plateau in Sewanee, Tennessee, I read James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (mostly) as he had wanted it read - aloud, alone, and at night. Stars at Noon is my response to Agee, to his book, and especially to the themes we share in common. I have written a meditation on art and beauty, sound and silence, presence and absence, what remains with us of the past, and, ultimately, what of it is knowable and what remains hidden, abiding but invisible as the stars at noon.
Hopefully, I have also written a compelling mystery about why I felt called by Agee and what I learned about the value of the search.
The book is available through Mercer University Press (2026) and, as the saying goes, “wherever books are sold.”