Notable Photography Collection Gifted to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art

By Bowdoin College Museum of Art
David and Gail Mixer have gifted to the BCMA a collection of more than 230 historic and contemporary photographs from around the world.
A black and white portrait photograph of a three-quarter portrait of a figure with coke bottle glasses

Edward Weston, Jose Clemente Orozco, 1931, vintage gelatin silver print on paper. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Gift of David and Gail Mixer. © 2024 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) has received a major gift of 238 works of global photography, from daguerreotypes to Polaroids to computer-generated prints, including examples by more than forty artists whose work was not previously represented in the BCMA’s collection. A gift of David and Gail Mixer, the collection focuses on artists—whether self-portraits or portraits of other artists—and includes pieces by such important figures as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Trude Fleischmann, Roni Horn, Lotte Jacobi, and Gillian Wearing, among many others. 

“This remarkable collection of works is a significant contribution to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, one that helps us tell both the history of photography and the history of art and artists,” said Frank Goodyear, Co-Director of the Museum. “In choosing to make portraits of themselves and other artists, these photographers foreground the idea that identity is fluid, bodies are malleable, and strangeness is both common and beautiful.”  

Added Anne Collins Goodyear, Co-Director of the Museum, “We are so grateful to David and Gail Mixer for their contribution, which will benefit generations of our students and other audiences. Since Frank and I arrived, building the BCMA’s photography collection has been a priority, and that collection has grown more than twenty percent over the last ten years. With one gift, the Mixer’s have both further improved our holdings and filled gaps of some forty different essential artists.”   

Thirty-five of these works will be on view at the Museum beginning October 30, 2024, in a new show titled Hello, Stranger: Artist as Subject in Photographic Portraits since 1900. Since the advent of photography in the 1840s, artists have seen ready subjects in themselves—and by capturing other artists. While traditional aesthetic portraiture conventions guided many early photographers, over time new approaches emerged—from these artists’ diverse historical contexts and experiences—leading to new bodies of work that are often pointedly evocative of their time, place, and focus. The exhibition explores this evolution of photography, and the ways in which a diverse group of artists used, evolved, and reclaimed the concept of portraiture to express themselves. On view through March 23, 2025, Hello, Stranger was co-curated by Isa Cruz ‘27 and Frank Goodyear, Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art. 

David Mixer is an experienced venture capital investor and entrepreneur with a career spanning several decades. He has been involved in founding and leading multiple venture capital firms, focusing on technology, communications, and agricultural technology investments, including Columbia Capital, Point Judith Capital and Middleland Capital. In 2016, he founded Mill Town Capital, to drive business development and community impact in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and throughout the Berkshires through a combination of strategic investing and philanthropy. Mill Town’s efforts have focused on neighborhood revitalization, housing investments, and the preservation of critical local assets with a long-term goal of sustainability for all projects. Over a 7-year period, Mill Town has deployed over $100M in the Berkshire County community across a variety of philanthropic and business projects. Together with his wife, Gail, the Mixers have been active collectors of photography.    

“Gail and I are thrilled that the collection will live on for a new audience at BCMA,” said David Mixer. “This collection has been a part of our lives, and it was important to us to see it given to a community that will honor and appreciate it, and provide exposure to a new generation of viewers.” 

In expanding the photographic holdings of the BCMA, the photography collection of David and Gail Mixer promises to build important historical connections and to expose audiences to the work of major photographers who worked collaboratively and experimentally with other artists of their time. 

A black and white photograph shows a single figure in a suit standing against a graffitied wall with double shadows

Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach (ringl + pit), Walter & Ellen Auerbach, London, ca. 1934, vintage silver print on paper. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Gift of David and Gail Mixer. © ringl + pit, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery