CURATOR CHAT

WE ASK LEADING MUSEUM CURATORS ABOUT

WHAT’S GOING ON IN THEIR WORLD

RAMEY MIZE
Assistant Curator of American Art
PORTLAND MUSEUM OF ART
Portland, ME • www.portlandmuseum.org

What event (gallery show, museum the Havana-born artist Ana Mendieta, PAM. With this project, we are looking to
exhibit, etc.) in the next few months while reigniting inquiries into the murky critically engage the role of Portland, and
are you looking forward to, and why? circumstances of her untimely death. Maine and New England more broadly, in
I can’t wait to see the exhibition Water the transatlantic slave trade.
Interesting exhibit, gallery opening
Memories, the first exhibition that
or work of art you’ve seen recently. What is your dream exhibit to curate?
Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha),
I haven’t been able to stop thinking Or see someone else curate?
Associate Curator of Native American
about a landscape painting in the PAM’s I am delighted to say that I’m actively
Art, has organized at the Met. This
collection by a little-known artist named immersed in a dream project at this very
installation features works that speak to
Maria Beckett. [She] was born in Portland, moment: the reinstallation project that
water’s profound and manifold meaning
Maine, in 1839 and devoted her prolific I mentioned above. With the support
to Indigenous people and Nations
forty-year career to painting. of a grant from the Terra Foundation
throughout the U.S.
for American Art, this reinstallation will
What are you researching transform the museum’s second floor by
What are you reading?
at the moment? bringing Indigenous and U.S. visual and
Over the past week, I’ve been completely
I am currently researching the history of material cultures into dynamic dialogue
engrossed in Helen Molesworth’s six-part
the sugar industry in Portland, Maine, for and highlighting complex histories that
[podcast] feature, “Death of an Artist,”
a reinstallation of our historical American have yet to be explored through our
which delves into the art and life of
galleries that we are pursuing here at the collection.

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