Finding his voice

Thu., June 21, 2007

By Julianne Crane juliannec@spokesman.com (509) 927-2158

Ben Mitchell

Job: Curator of art, Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, since August 2006

Age: 55

Education: Master of Fine Arts, Creative Writing, Vermont College, 1986. Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., 1985. Bachelor of Arts, English and Education, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Mich., 1975.

Previous employment: Includes director of exhibits and programs at the Nicolaysen Art Museum, Casper, Wyo. (2003-06); senior curator, Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings (1999-2003); director and curator of Whitman College's Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla (1992-98); curator of collections and exhibitions, Art Center of Battle Creek, Mich. (1988-92).

Major exhibitions: "John Buck: Iconography," May 2008, Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, traveling to five additional venues. "Contested Ground: Art and the New Northwest," February 2008, Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture. "Marie Watt: Blanket Stories, Almanac," 2006, Nicolaysen Art Museum and Boise Art Museum. "Jaune Quick-To-See Smith: She Paints the Horse," 2005, Nicolaysen Art Museum, Yellowstone Art Museum.

Publications include: "Andy Warhol's Dream America: Screen prints from the Jordan Schnitzler Foundation Collection" (University of Oregon Museum of Art, 2004). "The Most Difficult Journey: The Poindexter Collection of American Modernist Art" (University of Washington Press, 2002). "Brad Rude: Original Nature" (Halter Museum of Art, Helena, 1998). "Play Disguised: The Jewelry of Ken Cory" (Tacoma Art Museum and the University of Washington Press, 1997).

Ben Mitchell is starting to make his mark as the MAC’s curator of art.

He arrived at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture 10 months ago, and his first exhibition, “The Voices of Things: The Museum’s Collections,” opens Saturday.

“I’m really just the project director on this exhibit,” says Mitchell.

“Each of the curators from the museum’s four collecting areas – Archives, History, Plateau Studies and Art – has contributed significantly to the overall show.”

The six-month exhibit explores how every object in the collection has a unique voice, and how those voices, or stories, change in relationship to each other in the gallery setting.

“Each object has inherent in its presence a story,” says Mitchell. “There is something extraordinarily powerful in that.”

Mitchell naturally brings a storytelling approach to all of his curating and writing.

“I come from a Scotch-Irish tradition that was fundamentally woven together by story,” says the native West Virginian.

“On warm summer nights everyone would gather outside on their front porches,” he recalls. “The adults would be drinking ice tea, the children would be out in the yard catching fireflies in Mason jars and someone, usually the eldest, would start telling a story about life back in the UK.”

In his first career, as an elementary school teacher, Mitchell would use storytelling techniques in his social science classes.

His interest in storytelling led to a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing and eventually to working with museums.

“I am neither a trained artist nor an academic art historian,” he says. “I come to curating out of schoolteaching and writing.”

Mitchell arrived at the MAC with more than 20 years curatorial experience, most recently from the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyo., where he was the director of exhibits and programs.

Over the past two decades he has curated more than 100 shows and has written or contributed to more than a dozen books.

“Ben brings to the museum a level of professionalism that we have needed in our art programs for more than 10 years,” says the museum’s chief executive officer, Bruce Eldredge.

“His experience working with regional artists has dramatically improved the level and quality of our art exhibition and program offerings,” Eldredge says.

Lanny DeVuono, art professor at Eastern Washington University, looks forward to the possibility of more contemporary art exhibits.

“The museum has lost much of its art audience over the past 10 years because it hasn’t had many contemporary-focused shows,” says DeVuono.

“A lot of people in the art community are hoping Ben will be a strong voice for contemporary art.”

On his planning plate for 2008 are two major contemporary art exhibitions.

Beginning in February will be the first of three group shows centered around society’s relationship to the land.

“Contested Ground” will focus “on how contemporary artists are responding to environmental and social issues,” says Mitchell – how they are reacting “to the increasing fundamental dialogue we all face regarding global warming, water quality, shrinking resources, habitat loss, urban and suburban sprawl and impending species extinction.”

Opening in May will be “John Buck: Iconography,” a major exhibition of the Montana artist’s work. The exhibition will premiere at the MAC and then travel to at least five art museums.

“Education is the foundation of everything I hope to do,” says Mitchell. “I carry a very large bias that galleries and museums are a specialized kind of classroom for teaching and learning.

“One of the assumptions I bring to my curating is that the museum is a place for asking questions, far more than it is for us to provide pat answers,” he says. “The museum is a place to discover.”