Leadership Circles Lecture: From Idea to Exhibition: Inside “Winslow Homer: Painter, Etcher” with Ramey Mize and Judy Walsh

Registration for Lecture and Preview is Required 
Kindly RSVP to Breton Lorway, Philanthropy Administrator 
(207) 775-6148 ext. 3225 or blorway@portlandmuseum.org.   

To join or find more information on Leadership Circles, please contact:  
Lily Spearsmith, Annual Gifts Officer, at lspearsmith@portlandmuseum.org or (207) 318-2055. 

Ramey Mize and Judith C. Walsh offer a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Winslow Homer: Painter, Etcher. Together, Mize and Walsh will share how the concept for the project took shape through a generative combination of art historical and conservation research methods.  

Walsh, a renowned paper conservator and Winslow Homer expert, conducted the first technical analysis and survey of Winslow Homer’s etchings, serving as a critical consultant for this exhibition. Both she and Mize examined over eighty impressions of the artist’s prints across fifteen different museum collections to gather data and draw subsequent conclusions that help us better understand Homer’s process and techniques as a printmaker.  

Ramey Mize is the Susan G. Detweiler Associate Curator of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. From 2022 to 2026, she was the Associate Curator of American art at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. She specializes in art of the Americas from the nineteenth century to the present day, with a focus on cultural exchange, expressions of place, and intersections between Indigenous and settler art. Her curatorial practice is dedicated to expanding and reimagining the field, notably through the reinstallation project Passages in American Art (2023) and the award-winning exhibition and publication Jeremy Frey: Woven (2024). With major support from Judith C. Walsh, Mize has organized the present exhibition Winslow Homer: Painter, Etcher, which will offer viewers a historic opportunity to view Homer’s etchings in dialogue with the iconic paintings and watercolors that inspired them. Mize also served as editor for the scholarly catalogue, co-published by the PMA and Yale University Press, that accompanies the exhibition. Her research and curatorial work have been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Craft, the Thoma Foundation, the American Historical Print Collectors Society, as well as the Terra and Wyeth Foundations for American Art, among others. She holds a BA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. 

Over her career as a paper conservator, Judith C. Walsh tended the very collections that hold most of Winslow Homer’s work: Museum of Fine Arts, Worcester Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Clark Art Institute, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and Portland Museum of Art. Judy has been researching, lecturing, and writing about Homer for 45 years. 

In 2019, she was named an Honorary Fellow in the American Institute of Conservation for outstanding contributions to her profession. Judy is now lucky enough to live on Peaks Island, Maine, where every day she enjoys exactly what pleased Homer: rocks, waves and wind.