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About the People of Chelsea project –

The People of Chelsea Project was born from a deep love of the city of Chelsea, for its rich culture, vibrant beauty, and resilient community. Just across the harbor and only a bridge away from Boston, yet culturally distinct from its larger metropolitan neighbor, Chelsea is too often overlooked.
This project features and celebrates its residents, businesses, and institutions – from activists to entrepreneurs, from city officials to students, from old timers to newcomers. The People of Chelsea project is a positive mirror to the community and an homage to those who make the city work every day, across ages, experiences, and languages. Particularly during the mire of COVID-19, the project was a meaningful departure from the disaster-oriented media narratives about Chelsea, and each showing of this work became a source of civic pride. Through strong local collaborations, we have highlighted a community that is so much more than its pandemic losses: a Chelsea that is resilient, creative, courageous and just.
As the project has reached new audiences in and beyond Chelsea, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. People have been delighted to see their own images and stories as well as those of their friends, family, and neighbors. That momentum continues to grow as the project evolves. There are many more stories to be shared and people to be made visible.

About Darlene DeVita and Sarah Putnam –

Darlene DeVita has been a professional photographer for 30 years, and a resident of Chelsea, MA for two decades. She began the People of Chelsea Project in 2016. Her early career as one of the pre-eminent wedding photographers in the Boston area fine-tuned her skills photographing people, and this, combined with her innate love of community, is evident in the passion she brings to the People of Chelsea Project. More recently, Dar’s professional photography illuminates the work of local non-profits, schools, and corporations. Her clients have included The Boston Foundation, Athenahealth, La Colaborativa, Vinfen, MAB Community Services, Wentworth Institute of Technology, among others.

Sarah Putnam joined Darlene DeVita on the People of Chelsea Project in 2018, primarily to help in Spanish-speaking situations, conducting and editing interviews, and collaborating on the photographs by providing another set of eyes. Sarah has been in her own right a writer and freelance photographer for national publications and organizations for decades. Her writing has ranged from feature stories to interviews to reviews, her photographs have appeared in magazines and books, been included in both group and solo exhibitions, and she has produced multimedia pieces for the web. She was a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute.

The Griffin @ Lafayette City Center Passageway is located at 2 Ave de Lafayette in Downtown Crossing, Boston. The passageway connects Macy’s, the Lafayette Tower offices and the Hyatt Regency, Boston. For more information please contact the museum at 781.729.1158

The Griffin Museum of Photography is pleased to announce Elemental Blues: Contemporary Cyanotypes, an in-person exhibition featuring featuring the works of Anna Leigh Clem, Brett Windham, Bryan Whitney, Julia Whitney Barnes, Sally Chapman and Cynthia Katz. The show features the distinct and innovative works of six New England and Upstate New York-based artists that reveal the versatility of the medium through diverse processes and mixed-media explorations.

This collection of works is on the walls of our satellite location Griffin @ Lafayette City Center Place. Located in Boston’s Downtown Crossing, the address is 2 Ave de Lafayette, Boston, MA 02111 and hours are 6am – 10pm Daily.

Presenting photographs of the Basin Head sand dune system along the Northumberland Strait in Canada, Anna Leigh Clem infuses her eerie landscape with somber drama. Toning her works with foraged botanicals, she creates a tangible connection between each print and the landscape that inspired it.

Brett Day Windham’s delicate watercolor overlays illuminate the unseen rhythms of marine life, rendering fan corals as intricate, arterial compositions that underscore the interconnectedness of all life and consciousness.

Offering an unobstructed glimpse into the unseen, Bryan Whitney unveils the skeletal elegance of flowers through striking cyanotype x-rays. These luminous blueprints expose the intricate structure and delicate beauty inherent in botanical forms.

Cynthia Katz constructs fragmented cyanotypes arranging prints on rectangular grids and diptychs populated by small yet impactful details. The works are a creative approach to abstraction and evoke the elusive nature of memory and dreams.

Julia Whitney Barnes creates lavish and meticulously detailed works on paper, blending watercolor, gouache, ink, and cyanotype. Her pieces, reminiscent of fairy tale sights and sacred geometry, highlight the inherent beauty of our world.

Sally Chapman‘s rhythmic still life compositions capture the diverse objects of our everyday surroundings, creating a unique taxonomy of the organic with the manufactured. Delicate, drawing-like gestures on pastel further swirl through her observations. 

An eclectic representation of cyanotype-making, the artists featured in Elemental Blues explore ideas of visibility and transformation, utilizing cyanotype to reinterpret and reimagine natural and everyday subjects through their techniques.

The Griffin @ Lafayette City Center Passageway is located at 2 Ave de Lafayette in Downtown Crossing, Boston. The passageway connects Macy’s, the Lafayette Tower offices and the Hyatt Regency, Boston.

Jeff Larason’s Boston and Lynn Saville’s New York is a captivating exploration of quiet moments within two bustling urban environments.
This exhibition combines the powerful and evocative urban imagery of Boston photographer Jeff Larason and New York City photographer Lynn Saville. Both artists delve deep into the visual language of cities, capturing moments of solitude and reflection that are often overshadowed by the energy and chaos of urban life. Larason and Saville reveal a serene, reflective, and unexpectedly beautiful side of city life through their unique lenses.

 

Jeff Larason presents a deeply personal perspective of Boston, showcasing its familiar landmarks and lesser-known corners in a way that encourages the viewer to pause and appreciate the city’s quiet, contemplative moments. His work, often framed by strong architectural lines and vibrant tones, captures a timeless quality of the city’s urban life.

 

 

Lynn Saville, a widely renowned photographer known for her mastery of light and shadow, brings her iconic images of New York City into the spotlight. Her photographs of New York explore the intersection of light and the urban environment, often highlighting deserted streets and empty spaces that evoke a sense of tranquility amidst the towering skyscrapers and vibrant energy of the metropolis.

We are pleased to welcome the MFA students at Boston University’s department of Print Media & Photography to the Griffin’s satellite gallery at Lafayette City Center Passageway.

Dialogue presents work by Boston University’s Print Media and Photography MFA class of 2025. In this exhibition, each artist expresses their own artistic voice through an interdisciplinary approach that illuminates the nature of this unique MFA program.

Working in darkrooms, printmaking studios and beyond, the artists employ traditional and experimental techniques that oscillate between a variety of mediums to create a range of thematic dialogues.

Collectively, they explore issues of chance, feminism, identity, society, and politics. As you navigate the exhibition, we invite you to engage in these thematic dialogues, questioning and responding to the narratives contained within this body of work.

About the Artists

Shannon Johnson

I see connections everywhere and identify as a radical feminist in that I am constantly examining life through an understanding of structural patriarchy. It is through this radical feminist lens that I explore issues of feminism, bodily autonomy, social justice, intimacy, trauma, mental illness, and especially sexual violence. Using photography, printmaking, bookmaking, installation, and painting, I seek to explore and understand the relationships between the images, objects, and interpretations of the roles and values of women and our bodies. I collect a variety of materials including books, clothing, linens, and household objects as the foundation for many of these works: turning utilitarian, functional objects into works of art, now made neither functional nor utilitarian.

Text, images, and meanings are revealed and obscured through layers of ink, pastel, and paper, coalescing color, shapes, bodies, and subject matter, holes carefully cut through pages to piece together this web of patriarchy. By creating large impressions, I aim to place the viewer in an intimate space, removing the mask and closing the gap between the private and the public. I use self-portraiture and found images including didactic photography to reveal contradictions and, often unrealistic, expectations of the boxes we have been forced into. Through these different modalities, I aim to create an understanding and urgency regarding the intimate, emotional issue of women’s autonomy and freedom. The driving core of my work is the rallying cry of early feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, “the personal is political.” I aim for my work to be confrontational, to incite urgency in the viewer. The goal of my work isn’t to soothe or please the viewer, but to create an intense reaction. My work is explicit, and its rawness and obscenity are essential to convey the urgency of my rage and my abiding need for freedom.

Jason Parent

Born in New Jersey, raised in Upstate New York, and now based in Boston, Massachusetts, Jason Parent is a visual artist and MFA Print Media & Photography candidate at Boston University. With an interdisciplinary skill set, Jason explores the concept of identity.

The hidden and forgotten,
swept under the rug,
buried six feet deep —

A devotion to the exposure of life’s cover-ups inspires my work. Through my interdisciplinary practice, I explore themes of identity, memory, and emotion. Grounded in the excavation of my own existence, my interests expand to issues of gender, sexuality, and the human condition.

Jerry Rodríguez Sosa

Jerry Rodríguez Sosa is an interdisciplinary artist from Brownsville, Texas and Monterrey, México. After earning a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin, he worked in data analytics for multiple languages at Apple, followed by an internship in letterpress printmaking at Hatch Show Print in Nashville, Tennessee. Subsequently, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts to pursue his MFA in Print Media and Photography at Boston University.

My art is influenced by my heritage and identity. I primarily work with printmaking, photography, and drawing to explore how these intersections can help me craft personal and cultural narratives. My visual language incorporates bodies, symbolisms, text, photo archives, and geographical landscapes to examine and heal the internalities of my Mexican American, queer experience. 

Susan Swirsley

Susan is a visual artist who has traveled extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her diverse travel experiences and background in business and the social sciences offer a rich foundation for her work. The amalgamation of photography with other artistic disciplines, cultures and places opens up fascinating possibilities in her practice.

Currently based in Boston, she is a 2025 MFA candidate in the Print Media and Photography program at Boston University.

I am a photo-based artist who uses historical and contemporary processes to translate digital, film, and camera-less images onto paper, fabric, acrylic, and other surfaces. Resourcefulness, experimentation, and the use of “abandoned” materials such as expired paper and botanical remnants are integral to my practice. I create physical objects, large and small, including handmade books. 
 
My work is focused on the unpredictable intersection of abstract and representational images, weaving them together to create a new reality. I examine and question how photographic images function, what they represent and what we expect of them. Process, materiality, illusion, and the juncture of chance an preservation in photographic images play an important role in my artistic practice. I embrace the principle of chance by using materials (photographic paper and chemicals) in different ways than they are normally intended. This experimentation and element of surprise drives my work and extends to combining photographs with printmaking and painting processes and materials.

Tung Lin Tsai

Tung is a practitioner of everyday life who focuses on the relationship between mundanity and photography. As a photographer, he often incorporates everyday objects into his work. Items such as paper airplanes, plastic bags, office paper, and daily calendars are metaphorically placed in his pieces as political symbols. For Tung, these objects represent not only political language but also the reality of everyday life as a Taiwanese citizen — a citizen of a non-sovereign state. Tung is currently an MFA Photography and Print Media candidate at Boston University, navigating this complex world.

From analog to digital processes, from staged to candid images, I capture the mundane — like flying paper and plastic bags. When my strobes fire, they freeze a split second of reality. A strobe flashes for 1/500 to 1/25,000 of a second, capturing what human eyes can’t perceive. Yet, no matter how fast my strobes are, I can’t freeze this moment of peace. The lightness of everyday life is the true weight of Sisyphus’s rock, eternally rolled uphill. My work, therefore, carries the unbearable lightness of a piece of paper.