Mitzi Cunliffe

Mitzi Solomon Cunliffe (January 1, 1918 – December 30, 2006) was an American sculptor. She was most famous for designing the golden trophy in the shape of a theatrical mask that would go on to represent the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and be presented as the BAFTA Award. She also produced textiles, ceramics, and jewellery.

Early life Cunliffe was born Mitzi Solomon in New York City. She attended the Art Students League of New York from 1930 to 1933 Her early works, of free-standing figures, were admired by Le Corbusier.

Her first large scale commission was two pieces for the Festival of Britain in 1951. One, known as Root Bodied Forth, shows figures emerging from a tree, and was displayed at the entrance of the Festival. In the same studio at 18 Cranmer Road, Greek artist Leda Luss Luyken explored a similar principle of variable modularity in the arts in her ModulArt paintings of the 1980s.

Cunliffe developed a technique for mass-producing abstract designs in relief in concrete, as architectural decoration, which she described as "sculpture by the yard". She used the technique to decorate buildings throughout the UK, but particularly in and around Manchester. One example is a relief panel set high up on the external wall on the 1967–68 modern extension of Altrincham General Hospital on Market Street. Her last major architectural commission was the creation of four carved stone panels for Scottish Life House on Cheapside in the City of London in 1970.

Later life and death Cunliffe suffered from arthritis and eye problems in later life. She gave up sculpture to teach at Thames Polytechnic (which later became London South Bank University) from 1971 to 1976, and then at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the University of Pennsylvania, and Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

She later developed Alzheimer's disease, and retired to Oxford, but she remained in the public eye. Her designs were included in an exhibition of Public Sculpture held in Leeds at the Henry Moore Institute in the autumn of 1999. Her final exhibition took place in Oxford in 2001, where her work was included with that of other artists suffering from Alzheimer's. Her daughter Antonia named an annual prize (1994 to 2007) in her honour and presented to an exemplary presentation by a student in any media at the Ruskin School of Art of Oxford University.

She died at her nursing home in Oxfordshire, two days before her 89th birthday. She was survived by her three children.