About Mitchem Arts    

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     Mitchem Arts provides personal property valuation services and expert testimony for private clients, attorneys, corporations, non-profits, and insurance companies. The firm has extensive experience with loss and damage valuation and diminution of value issues. It also has extensive professional expertise in IRS related estate tax and charitable contribution appraisals.

 

Holly Anne Mitchem

     Holly Anne Mitchem founded Mitchem Arts, located in Ojai, California, in 1989. Ms. Mitchem earned her BA from Mills College in Art History, her MA in Art Education from Stanford University, and her PhD in Art History and Religion from the Graduate Theological Union in cooperation with the University of California, Berkeley. She is an Accredited Senior Appraiser credentialed in Fine Art with the American Society of Appraisers. Ms. Mitchem is qualified as an expert witness on personal property valuation issues and has testified in arbitration proceedings and at trial in Los Angeles and Ventura County Superior Courts.  Ms. Mitchem is a contributing author to the 2014-2018 monograph and text, The Appraisal of Personal Property, published by the American Society of Appraisers.

 

     In her commitment to developing the profession, Ms. Mitchem has developed courses and teaches and lectures regularly at the postgraduate level on personal property appraisal theory and methodology and on the identification, description, and valuation of fine art for the American Society of Appraisers. She has served as Personal Property Chair on the governing board of the Los Angeles Chapter of the ASA and on ASA's Personal Property discipline Board of Examiners. She has made recent presentations on personal property valuation issues at the International Conference of the American Society of Appraisers, and is a member of ASA's Board of Examiners.

 

     Ms. Mitchem regularly manages large projects involving a variety of personal property disciplines, including all types of fine art, gems and jewelry, antiques and decorative arts, numismatics, and musical instruments.  For these large-scale projects, Ms. Mitchem assembles and supervises teams of appraisal professionals with expertise in these disciplines.