Ramey Mize is a Ph.D. candidate and curator specializing in nineteenth-century art of the Americas, with a focus on the visual culture of landscape and conflict. Her dissertation, Battle Grounds: Painting, War, and Witness in the Americas, 1861–1901, traces the historical and visual imbrications of campaigns for U.S. empire in its consideration of conflict imagery made from the U.S. Civil War and Plains War to the Spanish-Cuban-American-Filipino War. This project offers new, cross-cultural pathways for understanding the agency of art in bearing witness to geo-political violence and upheaval.
In 2020-21, she was the Douglass Foundation Fellow in the American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She began her current role as the Lois and Arthur Stainman Research Assistant at The Met in June 2021, where she researches the permanent collection and supports upcoming special exhibitions, including Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents (April 2022). Her research and curatorial work have also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Curatorial Leadership, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the Library of Congress, the Decorative Arts Trust, and a two-year Anne Lunder Leland Curatorial Fellowship at the Colby College Museum of Art. 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.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
“Sacred Substantiations: Lincoln Casts and Statuary in the American Imagination,” essay in Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, Volume 8, University of Pittsburgh Department of Art History Graduate Journal, November 2019.
“‘The Violent Blaze’: Electrical Illumination in Joseph Stella’s Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913-14),” essay in Lapis, Volume 1, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, April 2019.
“History on the Horizon in Roger Toledo Bueno’s Soy Cuba Series,” essay for Soy Cuba / I Am Cuba: The Contemporary Landscapes of Roger Toledo exhibition website, University of Pennsylvania History of Art Department, April 2019.
“‘Whatever happens, we have got, the Maxim, and they have not’: The Conspicuous Absence of Machine Guns in British Imperialist Imagery," essay in Rutgers Art Review: The Graduate Journal of Research in Art History, Volume 34, October 2018.
“Power through Change: Ecological Ethics and Flux in Germaine Arnaktauyok’s Fish Man and Fish Woman,” essay for “The World is Following Its People”: Indigenous Art and Arctic Ecology exhibition, published by the University of Delaware History of Art Department, September 2018.