Then, Now, Next: The Evolution of A Yellow Rose Project (In-Person Panel)

Then, Now, Next: The Evolution of A Yellow Rose Project.
An in-person conversation with artists from A Yellow Rose Project

The Griffin Museum is pleased to present an in-person panel discussion featuring artists from A Yellow Rose Project: Rania Matar, Lisa McCarty, Mary Beth Meehan, and Toni Pepe. The conversation will be moderated by Yellow Rose Project Co-Founders Meg Griffiths and Frances Jakubek.

This panel will explore the evolution of A Yellow Rose Project — past, present, and future. The discussion will begin with the project’s inception and the artists’ initial responses to its prompt, continuing through the creation and release of the work in 2020, and into the present moment. Artists will reflect on how their practices have developed over time — some even tracing the origins of current work back to A Yellow Rose Project — and how the photographs and their meanings have shifted. The conversation will also consider how the themes of the project remain urgent and relevant today, perhaps more than ever.

Grounded in the understanding that “what we remember, what we forget, matters,” as historian Lisa Tetrault writes in The Myth of Seneca Falls, this panel invites a critical and thoughtful reexamination of both history and cultural memory. In revisiting this landmark collaboration, we aim to honor its historical context while also acknowledging the ways narratives have been shared, revised, or erased. As women and artists, we are actively shaping the ways our histories are told — and this conversation is part of that ongoing work.

Event Details

Date: One session on October 9, 2025

Time: 3:00 – 4:30 pm EDT

Format: In-person, at the Griffin Museum (67 Shore Rd. Winchester, MA 01890)

Panel Fee: FREE for members (RSVP required) / $10 for non-members. If you can, please consider donating — your support helps the Griffin Museum champion photography, uplift artists and educators, and inspire a vibrant creative community.

Level: Open to All!

About the Artists

About Rania Matar

Born and raised in Lebanon, Matar moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born Palestinian/American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography.

Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide in solo and group shows, including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, LACMA, Carnegie Museum of Art, ICA/Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Fotografiska, Institut du Monde Arabe, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums. 

A mid-career retrospective of her work was on view at Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and American University of Beirut Museum. Additional solo museum exhibitions include Middlebury Museum of Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Rollins Museum of Art, and Eskenazi Museum at Indiana University. 

Matar received several awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 (also 2011, 2007) Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, and Outwin Portrait Competition 2022 with an exhibition at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery/DC. 

She recently curated “Louder Than Hearts”, a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. 

Matar published four books: SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009. She is currently working on her fifth book: Where Do I Go?, to be released in Spring 2026.

About Lisa McCarty

Lisa McCarty is a photographer, educator, and a naturalist-in-training. Equal parts forager & researcher, her projects are informed by long-term fieldwork, reading, & archive digging. Many of McCarty’s projects begin as a response to unsung ecosystems or a lack of public records. 

McCarty has participated in over 100 exhibitions and screenings at venues including Amherst College, Carnegie Museum of Art, Cassilhaus, the Emily Dickinson Museum, Fruitlands Museum, the Griffin Museum of Photography, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, the Nasher Museum of Art, and the Visual Studies Workshop. McCarty’s photographs have also been featured in a variety of international festivals including Noorderlicht, Internationale Photoszene Köln, Picture Berlin, and Sören Kierkegaard in Images, while her moving images have been screened at the New York Film Festival, Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival, & Small File Media Festival. Her books include Transcendental Concord (Radius Books), The Arboretum Aphorisms of Nathaniel Dorsky (San Francisco Cinematheque), & William Gedney’s A Time of Youth (Duke University Press).

McCarty holds a MFA in Experimental & Documentary Arts from Duke University. She lives and works in Boston where she teaches at Northeastern University.

About Mary Beth Meehan

Mary Beth Meehan is a photographer, writer, and educator who uses images, text, exhibitions, and public installations to bring people together in the search for common ground. Her portraiture and community collaborations have challenged dominant narratives across racial, cultural, and social boundaries, addressing often fraught public dialogue with powerful imagery, personal backstories and tender archival material that lend an essential layer of humanity, insight, and care. Originally trained as a photojournalist, Meehan reckons with the limits of photography and yet continually sees the potential of visual art to help us uncover our social conditioning and unlock a path to greater understanding.

Meehan has held artist residencies at Stanford University, Brown University, the University of West Georgia, and the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and has lectured at the School of Visual Arts, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and the Missouri Photo Workshop. Meehan’s work has been featured and reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Le Monde. A native of Brockton, Massachusetts, Meehan received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature at Amherst College, and a Master of Arts degree in photojournalism at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

About Toni Pepe

Toni Pepe creates prints and three-dimensional assemblages from discarded newspaper images, family snapshots, and obsolete photographic equipment, investigating how photography shapes our understanding of time, space, and self. Her practice explores the layers of information a print conveys beyond its image—whether through the presence of text, subtle stains, or crop marks—each detail offering insight into the photograph’s journey and its significance as a physical object. More than static images, photographic prints capture and suspend our likenesses and histories, bearing the marks of time and physical interaction.

Pepe is the Chair of Photography and Associate Professor of Art at Boston University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, Blue Sky Gallery, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the MFA Boston, the Boston Athenaeum, Fidelity, the Boston Public Library, the Danforth Art Museum, the University of Oregon, Candela Books + Gallery, The Magenta Foundation, and numerous private collections. She was a resident at Frans Masereel Centrum in 2023, a MacDowell Fellow in 2024, and was recently named a Howard Foundation and Evelyn Stefansson Nef Fellow.

About the Co-Founders

About Frances Jakubek

Frances Jakubek is an image-maker, independent curator, and consultant for artists. She is the co-founder of A Yellow Rose Project, past Director of the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York City, and past Associate Curator of the Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts. 

Recent curatorial appointments include Critical Mass, Potential Space: A Serious Look at Child’s Play featuring works by Nancy Richards Farese, Filter Photo, The Griffin Museum of Photography, British Journal of Photography, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Save Art Space, and Photo District News. Jakubek’s photographs explore the boundaries of private and personal space and the emotions that bind them. Private Publicity looks at images paired with text that investigate the demanding language of our social outlets. The Sensual Subway embraces the New York City transit system and all it has to offer in its intimacy and delusion. Archive of the Ego is an ongoing series of self-portraits that have evolved and changed over the past 20 years.

Jakubek has been a panelist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Photography fellowships, speaker for SPE National and Colorado Photographic Arts Center, and lecturer for the School of Visual Arts,  Boston University, University of New Mexico, and Washington and Lee University. She has taught workshops for The Southeast Center for Photography, The Center for Fine Art Photography, Maine Media, and the University of Iowa.

About Meg Griffiths

Meg Griffiths is an artist, educator, and the Co-Founder of A Yellow Rose Project.

The wide arc of her work grapples with the various modes of domestic, cultural, and political engagement that structure female experience in the United States. Her inquiries are driven by a desire to capture, develop and share a closer understanding of (self-identifying) female subjects. Each project she creates, whether individual or collaborative, focused on the personal or the collective, are at heart about the intrinsic connection between self and other, between interiority and positionality, as much as kinship and community.

Her work has traveled nationally as well as internationally, and is placed in collections such as Center for Creative Photography, Capital One, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Her book projects, both monographs and collaborative projects, have been acquired by various institutions around the country such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Library, Duke University Library, Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Research Institute to name a few.

She currently lives in Denton, Texas where she is an Associate Professor of Photography in the Visual Arts Division at Texas Woman’s University.