New Curator Elizabeth Mitchell Announced at Cantor Arts Center at Stanford

STANFORD, CA.- The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University announces the appointment of Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell as the new Burton and Deedee McMurtry Curator of Drawings, Prints, and Photographs. Mitchell begins her duties in November, which include the oversight of nearly 7,000 artworks from the 15th to the 20th century from among the Center’s collection of 30,000-plus objects in all media and diverse cultures spanning 5000 years, from ancient China and Egypt to the 21st century.

“After an extensive international search, I am delighted to welcome Elizabeth Mitchell to the Cantor Arts Center,” said Director Thomas K. Seligman. “Elizabeth is an imaginative curator with a broad interest in art and a desire to make art accessible to museum visitors. Her tenure at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Fogg Museum at Harvard has prepared her very well to develop and enhance our fine collections of works on paper and develop engaging exhibitions at the museum.”

Elizabeth Mitchell joined the department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA) in 2007 as an assistant curator with special interest in prints from Britain, Mexico, and the United States. There she co-curated the exhibition American Scenes: Winslow Homer (2008) and curated Vida y Drama: Modern Mexican Prints (2009) and Artists Abroad: London, Paris, Rome and Venice, 1825–1925 (2010). Mitchell’s primary duty at the MFA was to curate and coordinate the works on paper that are integrated into 20 of the 53 galleries in the new Wing of the Art of the Americas, which opens in November 2010. Additionally, from 2008 to 2010 she taught a course on modern Mexican art at the Massachusetts College of Art as an adjunct lecturer. She has published on William Hogarth, the most recent essay being “William Hogarth’s Pregnant Ballad Sellers and the Printer’s Matrix” in Broadsides and Ballads in Britain, 1500-1800 (Ashgate Publishing, 2010).

Mitchell earned her Ph.D. in 2006 from the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she wrote her graduate thesis Mechanical Reproduction and Mechanical Philosophy: The Idea of Originality in 18th-Century British Printmaking. As a graduate student, she co-curated Pictures in Private: British Portraiture in Domestic Spaces (2003) at the Huntington Art Gallery in San Marino, and she drew from the Architecture and Design Collection at UCSB to curate the exhibition Nuclear Families: The Home Fallout Shelter Movement in California, 1950–1969 (2001). Before beginning her graduate studies, Mitchell was the 1997–1999 Lynn and Philip A. Straus Curatorial Intern in the Fogg Art Museum’s Print Department at the Harvard University Art Museums, where she curated Death by Hogarth, an exploration of capital punishment in prints by William Hogarth.

Mitchell joins four other curators at the Cantor Arts Center, each with expertise in their respective areas and responsibilities for exhibitions and the collections under their care: European art, modern and contemporary art, arts of Africa and the Americas, and Asian art. Three of the Center’s 24 galleries are devoted to changing exhibitions; other spaces present Cantor Arts Center collections, with changing displays of works on paper in three galleries.

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