Mitzi Humphrey
Printmaker and book artist Mitzi Humphrey was born in Johnson City, Tennessee and grew up in Lafayette, Indiana. She received her B.S. in Art Education with a minor in Fine Arts from the University of Tennessee. She was Director of Art at the Boys Club of Knoxville and taught art at West High School and Tyson Junior High School in Knoxville. She married Thomas MacGillivray Humphrey, a historian of economic thought, in 1957, and their first daughter, now a NYC artist, was born in Knoxville.
Humphrey was co-founder and first director of the Wofford College Art Gallery in South Carolina and designed a modular art display space for the Spartanburg/Greenville Airport as a project of the Spartanburg Artists Guild. Moving to New Orleans, she worked in the Newcomb College of Tulane University Chemistry Department and earned an M.A. in British and American Literature from Auburn University. In 1965, two days after Hurricane Betsy struck New Orleans, she gave birth to twins, a son and a daughter.
Moving to Midlothian, Virginia in 1970, Humphrey studied at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts with printmaker Marilyn Bevilacqua and was president of the Richmond Artists Association 1975-1977. She worked for several years at Scott-McKennis Gallery in Richmond's Carytown, one of only a handful of galleries in the city at that time. She was an adjunct faculty member in the English Department at the University of Richmond in the 1980's and active at the old Richmond Printmaking Workshop on Cary Street.
In the 1980's she was a Fluxus artist associated with ISCA (International Society of Copier Artists), The Center for Book Art, and Franklin Furnace, all based in NYC. She received her B.F.A. (1987) and M.F.A. (1997) in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, where her major professors were Barbara Tisserat and David Freed. She was co-founder of both Artspace and art6 Gallery in Richmond and was a president of Artspace and first Chair of the Executive Board of art6. As president of Artspace, she secured the lease at 6 East Broad Street for that gallery and later for art6 at the same locale. She is a member of ONE/OFF Printmakers and has participated in many of their portfolios and exhibitions, including ONE/OFF at Galleria SL Punto A, Milano, Italy (1999); ONE/OFF to Peru, ICPNA, Lima, Peru (2000); and Meridian/Meridien, Atelier Circulaire, Montreal, Quebec (2004). Other notable exhibitions have been "Two Identities: Bruce Onobrakpeya and Mitzi Humphrey" in Portsmouth, Virginia (2001) and a show with Warren Corrado curated by Petie Bogen-Garrett at Andrews Gallery, College of William and Mary. She was co-curator with photographer Anne Savedge of "Art ex Machina: The National Copier Art Show" at 1708 Gallery, sole curator of "Art ex Libris: The International Book Art Show" at Artspace, and curator of "Fluxus Redux" at art6. She is the originator and moderator of "The Pinkney Near Memorial Lectures in Art History," a series featuring talks by noted art historians at art6.
Humphrey has received many grants and awards, including, in 1996, "Virginia Artist of the Year" by the Richmond Women's Caucus for Art. She has been a frequent instructor of printmaking and book art workshops for the Hand Workshop (now the Visual Arts Center) and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She was deputy director of Non-Toxic 2000, a small but influential Virginia program aimed at converting printmakers to the use of non-toxic studio methods and changing the chemistry of printing inks and solvents. She is a member of Pi Lambda Theta and Phi Kappa Phi honorary societies and of Franklin Furnace and the Southern Graphics Council. Her Summer Wind Letterpress Studio is in Midlothian, Virginia, and she currently serves as co-chair with Henrietta Near on the Education and Outreach Committee of art6.