 | Mimi Gardner Gates |
Mimi Gardner Gates '81 Ph.D., who has led two of the nation's leading arts museums, was elected as the newest alumni fellow of the Yale Corporation in a worldwide ballot of University graduates.
Gates has been director of both the Yale University Art Gallery and the Seattle Art Museum, and has also been a leader of civic and arts-related organizations.
The alumna spent two decades at the Yale University Art Gallery, starting in 1975 as assistant curator of Asian art. She was named curator in 1979 and the Henry J. Heinz II Director in 1986, a position she held until 1994 when she was appointed director of the Seattle Art Museum. She was also an adjunct professor in the Department of the History of Art. While at Yale, Gates taught and organized major scholarly exhibitions, encouraged faculty and student exhibitions, especially interdisciplinary projects, and initiated efforts to reach out to the New Haven community.
As director of the Seattle Art Museum, Gates has overseen the creation of a nine-acre waterfront sculpture park and a 300,000-square-foot addition to the museum building. During her tenure, the museum's endowment has tripled, its membership and attendance have more than doubled, and over 2,500 strategic acquisitions have greatly enhanced its art collection. Gates has initiated large-scale international exhibitions -- Asian, European and African -- and increased the commitment to scholarship at the Seattle Art Museum. She also serves as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Washington.
After completing her B.A. at Stanford University, Gates earned honors studying Chinese language and culture at the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris, and completed a master's degree at the University of Iowa. For her Ph.D. in the history of art from Yale, she wrote a dissertation on the life and work of a 14th-century Chinese Daoist painter.
Gates has organized numerous scholarly exhibitions and co-authored exhibition catalogues, including "Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice: The Flowering Plum in Chinese Art" (Yale 1985) and, more recently, "Porcelain Stories: From China to Europe," a story of cross-cultural aesthetics and technology spanning 12 centuries (Seattle 2000).
The alumna is a former president and current trustee of the Association of Art Museum Directors. She has served on steering committees of the Museum Program of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Getty Leadership Institute Advisory Committee.
Gates joined the Yale University Art Gallery's governing board in 2002. The Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences awarded her its Wilbur Cross Medal as a distinguished alumna in 2006.
T H I S
Former Yale gallery director has
been elected an alumni fellow
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