PORTLAND, ME.- The Portland Museum of Art announced the hire of Ramey Mize as the museum’s Assistant Curator of American Art. Mize will begin her role at the PMA in March, and immediately support the museum’s Art for All mission to provide a strong artistic vision that drives conversation, creativity, cultural vitality, and economic impact.
Before joining the PMA, Mize was the Lois and Arthur Stainman Research Assistant in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing, where she supported the forthcoming exhibition, Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents. Mize is also a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in nineteenth-century visual culture of the United States, with a focus on intersections with Native and Latin American art.
Mize’s commitment to the PMA’s values of courage, equity, service, sustainability, and trust are apparent over a decade of community-centered curatorial practice across a variety of platforms and institutions. Mize has helped organize exhibitions on 20th-century Inuit drawing (2018), the 19th-century U.S. Etching Revival (2019), contemporary Cuban landscape painting (2019), and other wide-ranging topics. Her dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, “Battle Grounds: Painting, War and Witness in the Americas, 1861–1901,” traces the historical and visual connections between campaigns for U.S. empire in its consideration of conflict imagery made from the U.S. Civil War and Plains Wars to the Spanish-Cuban-American-Filipino War. This project epitomizes the characteristics and perspective Mize will bring to the PMA, offering new, cross-cultural pathways for understanding the agency of American art in everyday life and prioritizing multi-vocal narratives of cultural entanglement, connection, and exchange.
“We’re so excited to have Ramey join our team, and we’re looking forward to seeing how she works with the PMA’s extraordinary collection of American art,” states Shalini Le Gall, the PMA’s Chief Curator and Susan Donnell and Harry W. Konkel Curator of European Art. “Her expertise in the historical aspects of this field, and experience with nuanced and expansive exhibitions of American art will be such assets for the museum and its visitors. We’re thrilled to welcome her to the PMA, and to Portland.”
In 2020–21, Mize was The Met’s Douglass Foundation Fellow in the American Wing and a participant in the Center for Curatorial Leadership / Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice. Previously, she has also held curatorial fellowships and positions at the Colby College Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Atlanta High Museum of Art.
“I am looking forward to joining the Portland Museum of Art at this important moment of reckoning, reflection, and redefinition for the field of American art,” says Mize. “I have long been inspired by the museum’s stellar collection, community-centered exhibitions, and meaningful Art for All commitment. Having begun my museum career in Maine nearly a decade ago, I am grateful for this opportunity to return to the state’s vibrant arts landscape, of which the PMA is a vital part. I look forward to collaborating with my colleagues and the broader Portland community in the coming months to explore expanded American art histories together.”
Mize’s research and curatorial work have been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the Library of Congress, and the Decorative Arts Trust. She holds a B.A. with Highest Honors in Art History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and an M.A. with Distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
