ANITA VENTURA MOZLEY (1928–2010)

Anita Ventura Mozley, founding curator of photography at the Stanford University Museum of Art and a leading expert on Eadweard Muybridge, died January 23 of natural causes at her home in Menlo Park. She was eighty-one.

Soon after joining the museum as registrar, she recognized the significance of its comprehensive collection of Muybridge’s stop-motion photographs of the horse in motion, commissioned a century earlier by Governor Leland Stanford. She was named curator of photography in 1971 and the following year organized her most significant exhibition, “Eadweard Muybridge: the Stanford Years, 1872–1882” which traveled nationally and internationally. Mozley later wrote the introductory text to Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion (1979).

Active in the New York art scene of the 1950s as a writer, critic, and painter, Mozley designed posters for the Leo Castelli Gallery and came to know Jasper Johns. Years later, she donated two Universal Limited Art Editions lithographs Johns had inscribed to her to what is now known as Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center.

Mozley served as managing editor and West Coast correspondent for Arts Magazine from 1955 to 1964. With sculptor Sidney Geist, she produced an alternative arts newsletter, Scrap, from 1960 to 1962. Scrap grew out of their dissatisfaction with conventional art criticism and expressed, as Geist later wrote, “both a combativeness and an irreverence toward criticism itself.”