Lasting Memories

Anita Mozley
1929-Jan. 23, 2010
Menlo Park, California

Anita Ventura Mozley, 81, founding curator of photography at the Stanford University Museum of Art and a resident of Menlo Park, died Jan. 23, 2010.

She was born in Washington, D.C., to Mario and Juanita Ventura, and grew up in Rochester, N.Y. In 1950, she earned a degree in art with honors, from Northwestern University; she also was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1950, she studied with Morris Kantor at the Art Students League in New York City. She 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.

Moving to San Francisco in 1962, she worked at the Maritime Museum and married physicist Robert Mozley before joining the Stanford Museum in 1970. Soon after joining the museum as registrar, she recognized the significance of its comprehensive collection of Eadweard 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." It traveled nationally and internationally.

Jed Pearl, art critic of The New Republic, said she would be remembered for her "pioneering scholarly work" on Muybridge, which "like all of Anita's undertakings, were fueled by an artist's sensibility." After her retirement in 1986, she again took up drawing and painting, and exhibited in California and at shows near her summer home at Southport, Maine.

Her husband of 32 years, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, died in 1999. She is survived by her stepson, Peter Mozley of Soccoro, N.M.; and three nieces.