Ford Center to Display Photos of Entertainment Icons

OXFORD, Miss. – The Jack Mitchell Photo Collection, which serves as a of who’s who among artists, actors, performers and others of the 1960s forward, opens Friday (Nov. 15) in the lobby of the Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts. The exhibition runs through March 7, 2014.

The exhibit is on loan from the Thrasher-Horne Center for the Arts in Orange Park, Fla. This is the first time the collection has been shown outside Florida and is the first stop on a two-year tour through the Southeast.

Tony Walsh, executive director of the Thrasher-Horne Center, will deliver a lecture about the late Mitchell and the collection at 5:30 p.m. Monday (Nov. 18) in the Ford Center’s Studio Theatre. It is free and open to the public.

“With our shared participation in the Dance Touring Initiative, we and Thrasher-Horne agreed that Mitchell’s iconic photos of dancers would be a great complement to the activities and goals of the initiative,” said Norm Easterbrook, Ford Center director. “Along with the lecture, we hope the photo exhibition will engage an ever larger audience for modern dance by providing both performances and community activities.”

Mitchell, a Florida native who spent his career in New York City, served as a photographer for the U.S. Army in Italy during the end of World War II. In New York, he became the photographer for the American Ballet Theater for a decade and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for more than three decades.

He is also recognized for his work for The New York Times and Dance Magazine, for which he created 168 cover photographs. Mitchell’s photographs also appeared on the covers of and in Rolling Stone, The New York Magazine, People, Newsweek, Time, Life, Vogue, Elle and Vanity Fair, among others.

His long list of photographic subjects includes Robin Williams, Al Pacino, Angela Lansbury, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Natalie Wood, Leontyne Price and Gloria Swanson, among others. Mitchell retired in 1995 and passed away Nov. 7, 2013.

The Jack Mitchell Photo Collection is free and open to the public during normal Ford Center operating hours, as well as during performances. For more information, visit http://www.FordCenter.org or call 662-915-2787.