Griffin Museum of Photography

Griffin Atelier Gallery

A Yellow Rose Project

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The Griffin Museum is honored to present A Yellow Rose Project, a photographic collaboration of responses, reflections, and reactions to the 19th Amendment from over one hundred women across the United States. A Yellow Rose Project is co-founded and curated by Frances Jakubek and Meg Griffiths.

As the year 2020 marked the centennial of the 19th Amendment, over one hundred women were invited to join this photographic project and were asked to make work in response, reflection, or reaction this event.

Over 100 years ago, women wearing yellow roses stood shoulder to shoulder in Tennessee awaiting the roll call of men that would cast their votes for or against a woman’s right to a voice in government. The bright flower was an outward symbol of their expression to gain equal representation. After decades of untold risk—through oppression, brutality, incarceration, and even starvation—women on many fronts, in their communities, on the state level as well as the national scale, fought against insurmountable odds to gain the right to be a part of the democratic process. Though this movement granted rights to some women, and this achievement in itself is to be acknowledged and commemorated, the struggle did not end there. It was not until much later that all American women, regardless of race, were given the same privilege. Due to state laws and prohibitive policies, many women of color were unable to exercise their rights even given this momentous event.

    • The goal of A Yellow Rose Project is to provide a focal point and platform for image makers to share contemporary viewpoints, to gain a deeper understanding of American history and culture, and to build a bridge from the past to the present and future. The artists in this show look back upon our history from various perspectives, inviting both a critical eye as well as one that sees how far we have come. Overall, this collaboration reflects the effort to find inspiration in the power of women to influence public perception and the perseverance to continue the arduous fight to obtain equal rights beyond ratification.

    A Yellow Rose Project is co-founded and curated by Meg Griffiths and Frances Jakubek.

    This extraordinary exhibition now has a catalog of images and text. The Griffin museum will have copies on hand, and now available for preorder here.

    The artists featured in this show are

    Keliy Anderson-Staley, Kalee Appleton, Tami Bahat, Deedra Baker, Nancy Baron, Lindsey Beal, Sheri Lynn Behr, Katie Benjamin, Julia Bennett, Sara Bennett, Anne J Berry, Christa Bowden, Edie Bresler, Lily Brooks, Ellen Carey, Patty Carroll, Tracy L Chandler, Elizabeth M Claffey, Ashleigh Coleman, Tara Cronin, Frances F Denny, K.K. Depaul, Rebecca Drolen, Yael Eban & Brea Souders, Odette England, Carol Erb, Tsar Fedorsky, Ellen Feldman, Marina Font, Preston Gannaway, Anna George, Susan Kae Grant, Meg Griffiths, Sarah Hadley, Alice Hargrave, Carla Jay Harris, Chehalis Deane Hegner, Ileana Doble Hernandez, Bootsy Holler, Sarah Hoskins, Letitia Huckaby, Cindy Hwang, Megan Jacobs, Frances Jakubek, Ina Jang, Farah Janjua, Jordana Kalman, Priya Kambli, Marky Kauffmann, Ashley Kauschinger, Kat Kiernan, Heidi Kirkpatrick, Sandra Klein, Katelyn Kopenhaver, Molly Lamb, Kathya Maria Landeros, Rachel Loischild, Sara Macel, S. Billie Mandle, Rania Matar, Lisa McCarty, Noelle McCleaf, Jennifer McClure, Mary Beth Meehan, Yvette Meltzer, Leigh Merrill, Diane Meyer, Jeanine Michna-Bales, Laura E Migliorino, Hye-Ryoung Min, Alyssa Minahan, Greer Muldowney, Colleen Mullins, Carolyn Mcintyre Norton & Betty Press, Emily Peacock, Toni Pepe, Rachel Pillips, Sarah Pollman, Greta Pratt, Thalassa Raasch, Larissa Ramey, Astrid Reischwitz, Tamara Reynolds, Paula Riff, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Claudia Ruiz Gustafson, Serrah Russell, Gail Samuelson, Kris Sanford, Kyra Schmidt, Maude Schuyler Clay, Manjari Sharma, Emily Sheffer, Aline Smithson, Joni Sternbach, Kristine Thompson, Amy Thompson Avishai, Sasha Tivetsky, Maria Triller, Malanie Walker, Claire A Warden, Rana Young, Cassandra Zampini, and Karen Zusman.

    André Ramos-Woodard | BLACK SNAFU

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    Anti-Blackness seems inescapably mixed into whatever context I place it into; literature, science, government, health, art… look into any “field” and see for yourself. My people have had to cry, scream, and fight for respect for centuries, and we still have not gained what we deserve. To move past the damage this has done to our society, we can’t simply deny our history—we must recognize it. We must acknowledge the many ways in which this country has perpetuated a racial hierarchy since these lands were first colonized and stripped from indigenous peoples, and Black people were stolen from their native land and brought to America.
    In BLACK SNAFU (Situation Niggas: All Fucked Up), I appropriate various depictions of Black people that I find throughout the history of cartooning and juxtapose them with photographs that celebrate and line up more authentically with my Black experience. The photographs I create vary in subject matter; I seek to include celebratory portraits, didactic still lives, and representational documentations of places rich in their relation to Black community, allowing me to fight back against the history of the racist caricature that I reclaim in my work. By combining these ambivalent visual languages, I intend to expose to viewers America’s deplorable connection to anti-Black tropes through pop culture while simultaneously celebrating the reality of what it means to be Black.

    About André Ramos-Woodard

    Raised in the Southern states of Tennessee and Texas, André Ramos-Woodard (he/they) is a photo-based artist who uses their work to emphasize the experiences of marginalized communities while accenting the repercussions of contemporary and historical discrimination.
    His art conveys ideas of communal and personal identity, influenced by their direct experience with life as a queer African American. Focusing on Black liberation, queer justice, and the reality of mental health, he aspires for his art to help bring power to the people.
    Selected for Foam Museum’s Foam TALENT Award in 2024 and a two-time top-50 Finalist for Photolucida’s Critical Mass (in 2020 and 2023), Ramos-Woodard has shown their work at various institutions across the United States a beyond, including the Foam Museum–The Netherlands, Amsterdam, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston–Houston, Texas, Leon Gallery–Denver, Colorado, and FILTER Photo–Chicago, Illinois. He received his BFA from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and his MFA at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

    We are grateful to the Cummings Foundation for their support of the arts and the Griffin Museum. The Cummings Residency program highlights artists of diverse backgrounds and using their specific skill set, work to create a photographically based exhibition as a result of their connection to the Griffin Museum, Winchester and surrounding areas, while engaging in critical dialogues about art and culture with both the youth and adult community they inhabit. Using photography as a bridge to building relationships, the Cummings Fellow creates a series of images opening up the pathways to multicultural understanding and acceptance. The museum and its partners are creating a literacy program centered around imagery, using photography as the tool, working with professional artists to talk about their communities, cultures and new and shared origin stories.

    Kevin Bennett Moore | Meditations in an Emergency

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    Meditations in an Emergency

    Influenced by my own queer experience and ideals of mid-century American culture, my work investigates a familiar environment that alludes to something more enigmatic. Creating vignettes of this space and time allows for the images to exist in reality or remain fictitious. 

    Initially making work about control of the environment, I am able to create a safe space for the narrative to unfold; purposely diverting from what we may consider conventional. The characters become distant protagonists as the work allows the viewer to respond as a voyeur.

    “Meditations in an Emergency” explores quiet amongst chaos. By focusing on themes of disaster and tragedy I am able to address the human condition; attempting to thrive in times of turmoil.

    About Kevin Bennett Moore

    Kevin Bennett Moore (b. 1996) is an artist living and working in Boston. His self-portrait based projects largely discuss queerness by utilizing the past to talk about current politics. Moore is influenced greatly by films of the 1950s & 60s, gender performativity, and ideals of mid-century American culture. He graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a degree in photography (BFA ’20)

    Jo Sandman | A Life in Art

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    The Griffin is thrilled to showcase the work of creative artist Jo Sandman. The museum is proud to hold in its collection objects that span the breadth and depth of Sandman’s creativity. Her exploration of craft, utilizing photography as a base layer expands our vision of humanity, our way of seeing. In the 1990s, Sandman turned her attention to photography, grounding her images in the human figure, mortality, and the tensions between the material and the spiritual. Sandman’s photographic work is characteristically experimental—she employs both antique 19th-century photographic processes alongside contemporary medical and digital imaging techniques to create her beautiful, poetic, and disquieting images.

    About Jo Sandman –

    Jo Sandman was not only a witness to the historically important experimentation that shaped mid to late 20th century art, but also an active participant . A student of both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, she was in residence at Black Mountain College with Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly and later worked for Walter Gropius. Trained as a painter, she went on to create innovative drawings, photography, experimental sculpture and installation works, which were exhibited widely and are now in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, and many others. In addition to numerous artist residencies and teaching fellowships, she taught at Wellesley College and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Significant awards include fellowships from the Massachusetts Arts Council and the Bunting Institute at Harvard, as well as grants from the NEA and the Rockefeller Foundation. Over the course of a long career, she exhibited widely and in 2022 was featured in a career retrospective Jo Sandman: Traces at the Black Mountain College Museum in Asheville, NC and the exhibition Helen Frankenthaler and Jo Sandman/Without Limits at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, ME.

    Bridget Jourgensen | Homeshadows

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    Homeshadows is a study of solitude.  Over the course of a year and at the height of the pandemic in 2020, I found myself in a new home and very much alone on a day-to-day basis.   As an introvert and sometimes anxious person, it was a bit of a dream come true.  But while I wasn’t exactly lonely, I was yearning to use my time creatively and feel connected to something while the world outside raged.    I began to document the light and shadows that streamed through the windows of my house.  Everything in my home was new to me, and I had the pleasure of watching the seasons unfold from the inside.  I sometimes put myself in the images to round out the developing narrative.  I worked to capture light and manage composition with great attention to mood and detail in order to convey the sense of solitude, beauty, and mystery that I was experiencing during this period of time.  Although I had been taking photographs for many years, this was my first intentional series and attempt at cohesive storytelling through images.

    I am eager to continue the path of storytelling through photography.   The grant money would be used towards printing and framing expenses for my series Homeshadows, as well as for a new project which explores the following theme:  things women hide from themselves and others.  

    My love of photography began as a young girl leafing through my mother’s Vogue magazines and feeling enthralled by the lush images within. As a pre-teen I made images of my family with a Kodak Instamatic 100, and documented the mundane details of my day-to-day life. It seemed that everything looked more glamorous printed on 4×4 squares, accompanied by strips of eerie negatives. I was hooked. As an adult photographing a world which is increasingly complex, my lens seeks out simple, quiet subjects that are familiar yet presented in a distinctive way. Influenced by the work of Vivian Maier, Gordon Parks, and Sally Mann, I’m drawn to photographing people in the world around me. Whether that world is within my own four walls or a country I’ve never stepped foot in, my desire to observe others is the foundation for a great deal of my work. By sharing my images, I hope to spark human connections and emphasize our commonality through a moment captured in time.

    About Bridget Jourgensen

    I grew up in the era of Kodak film and heavy 35mm cameras with popping flashbulbs that were too hot to touch after being used. I still remember how my mother would eject them into the nearest ashtray where they would smolder and sizzle for a bit.

    My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 100. I made images of my room, my family, myself, my pets – the usual things. My ordinary life somehow seemed glamorous when printed on 4×4 squares, accompanied by strips of eerie negatives. I was hooked.

    Thousands of photographs later, the joy of shooting and editing endures, particularly as I uncover themes in my work that have emerged over the years.

    The Griffin Museum of Photography is thrilled to announce the winner of the 2024 John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship, Bridget Jourgensen. Her series Homeshadows captivated this year’s jury to earn her a monetary award, an upcoming exhibition and artist talk at the Griffin Museum as well as a volume from the collection of photographer John Chervinsky.

    Over 281 photographers submitted applications to be considered for the scholarship this year. The jurors, Arlette and Gus Kayafas, Frazier King and Bruce Myren have selected Bridget Jourgensen as the 2024 recipient of the John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship.

    Marcus DeSieno | Privacy is a Myth We Tell Ourselves to Sleep

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    In the 21st century, with the ubiquity of digital imaging, the omnipresence of the internet as a means of exchange, and the rise of artificial intelligence, we face a new era where the camera is now an active participant in the role of seeing. Imagery and photography are being significantly used to control our lives. Yet, this massive ideological paradigm shift in image-making and interpretation remains invisible to most.
    My work investigates the various ways in which visual technology transforms, commodifies, and regulates our lives – with specific attention devoted to the notion of privacy. The average person is largely unaware of the ways in which image-based technology is invading their private sphere; actively dismantling any reasonable expectation of privacy. If these systems remain unseen than how will this average citizen begin to understand how they are affected?
    These invisible technological systems are turned visible through my work for the viewer so they can understand the constraints placed on their lives. My work uses image- making in a performative way to interact with these technological tools of control to make the viewer aware of the convoluted architecture and infrastructure of machine vision and the authority embedded within. I intentionally misuse, re-imagine, and repurpose a variety of surveillance technology to create my photographic work. I actively subvert the original intention of this technology through my art as an act of protest.
    Algorithms, neural networks, and the language of the computer are transformed into artwork that relies on pictorial traditions for the viewer to more easily grasp the information they are receiving. My work turns the abstract and intangible into something material for the viewer to recognize and interpret. This process of transformation is central for the viewer to understand the politics entrenched in this technological battleground.
    Ultimately, at the core of my work is an interrogation of the reliance on this visual technology as a mechanism of power and what this means for our future as we rely on automated computer programming. There are irreparable consequences surveillance technology has on us as a global society and the 21st century requires a new form of visual literacy to understand what is at stake.

    About Marcus DeSieno —

    Marcus DeSieno is a visual artist interrogating institutions of power through the language of photography. DeSieno is particularly interested in documenting the continued legacies of American Empire and how visual technology is used as a tool of oppression by the State. DeSieno often uses specific historic and experimental analog photographic processes to create conversations between power and history. He received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida and is currently Associate Professor of Photography at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington.

    DeSieno’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Aperture Foundation in New York, Paris Photo, The Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece, The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, Finland, Photo Access in Canberra, Australia, Center for Fine Art Photography, Candela Gallery, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and various other galleries and museums. His work has also been featured in a variety of publications including The British Journal of Photography, The Boston Globe, FeatureShoot, GUP Magazine, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, National Geographic, PDN, Slate, Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, and Wired. DeSieno was named a selection for Photolucida’s Critical Mass 50 and an Emerging Talent by Lensculture. His first monograph, No Man’s Land: Views From a Surveillance State, was published by Daylight Books.

    Suzanne Theodora White | Dry Stone No Sound of Water

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    2023 Members Juried Exhibition Director’s Prize Winner Suzanne Theodora White’s series Dry Stone No Sound of Water is a deeply layered, textured look at how we see the landscape. Her constructions beg us to look deeper, to explore the frame, finding something familiar, yet seeing the world differently. Her still life images combine pieces of nature and photography to create new landscapes for us to transit.

    I have a profound connection to the natural world and the human impact on our environment has been an overriding theme in my work throughout my years as an artist. The farm that I live on and have worked for decades, is my muse, where I record changes linked to climate disruption, time, and memory. Through an inter-disciplinary practice including photography, video, and site-specific installations, I explore issues of life, death, grief, and our cultural disconnect from nature. With my work I am asking, can art carry the burden of remembering the past, while confronting what the future may hold? From a fixed point on the map, I am a traveler through the Anthropocene.

    About Suzanne Theodora White

    Trained as a painter, Suzanne studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, and has an MFA from Maine Media College. She was a two-time winner of fellowships awarded by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. After receiving the first of these awards, she spent over a year on the road traveling alone, overland, through Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Far East. In the 1980’s and 90’s she made extended trips to South America to study birds in the Amazon basin and Central America.

    Suzanne has had many solo exhibitions and has been included in group shows over her long career including Yale University, New Haven, CT; Cove Street Arts, Portland, ME; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; Art Institute of Boston; Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston, MA; and Colby College, Waterville, ME.

    Suzanne lives in Maine with her two dogs and a large flock of chickens.

    Huellas de Existencia | Traces of Existence

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    We often measure our existence by the objects we hold, our memories, and the stories told through generations. Traces of Existence unites these three artists, each speaking to ideas of migration, history, reminiscence, family, and existence through their constructed imagery, such as collage, visual juxtapositions, and physical manipulations.

    Using photographs, video and installation, these visual narratives reflect the artists’ exploration of identity, their relationship with their homeland, and the socio-political issues of Latin America and the United States. The highly charged political language used to identify immigrants as others exacerbates the complexity of the already cultural, emotional and physical barriers we establish, both real and arbitrary lines of existence. The artists of Traces work to connect the physical landscape with the memory of what is left behind. 

    Focusing on what is often unseen or overlooked, these artists tell the stories of transition, relocation, and exile. Using vernacular photography, Alejandro Cartagena‘s Foto Structures connotes the issues of anonymity and identity. Muriel Hasbun‘s Pulse: New Cultural Registers reframes the cultural legacy of El Salvador during the 1980s and ’90s by layering the earth’s seismographic movements with archival photographs of the artist’s family. Alejandro Luperca Morales shows us in real-time the transition between the US and Mexico; viewers watch a migration point on the border; with each anonymous crossing, we witness their relocation. 

    These three distinct narratives, underscore the profoundly personal and individual nature of immigration, relocation and cultural memory of what is left behind. 

    Alejandro Cartagena: Photo Structure / Foto Estructura

    ©Alejandro Cartagena
    ©Alejandro Cartagena
    ©Alejandro Cartagena

    Alejandro Cartagena sifts through landfills in the outskirts of Mexico City to collect discarded photographs. His finds—thousands of portraits, snapshots, and tourist views—remind him of photographs he encountered while employed at the photograph archive (Fototeca) of the state of Nuevo León. Photographs are deposited at the Fototeca because they are considered important to Nuevo León’s cultural, political, and social history. At institutional repositories like the Fototeca, archivists arrange, preserve, and describe photographs and make them available to researchers and the public. Through these processes, archived photographs form part of the historical record. In the archive, they command evidential authority they otherwise might not have.

    Cartagena’s found photographs, deposited in a landfill and not an archive, have no such authority. What meaning is left in a photograph once it has been discarded? Under what circumstances might it have meaning? To explore these questions, Cartagena takes on the role of archivist, carefully arranging and re contextualizing his collection of castoffs.

    ©Alejandro Cartagena
    ©Alejandro Cartagena
    ©Alejandro Cartagena

    Alejandro Cartagena, Mexican (b. 1977, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban, and environmental issues. Cartagena’s work has been exhibited internationally in more than 50 group and individual exhibitions in spaces including the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and the CCCB in Barcelona, and his work is in the collections of several museums including the San Francisco MOMA, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The MFAH in Houston, the Portland Museum of Art, The West Collection, the Coppel collection, the FEMSA Collection, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the George Eastman House and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and among others.

    Muriel Hasbun: Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales

    Pulse: RŽplicas, 1986 (Homage, Julio Sequeira), 2020

    Is it possible to trace our journey through a visual record of the land’s pulses? Can we metaphorically mark our personal and cultural legacies onto the land and in the process make it our terruno and diasporic homeland?

    Pulse: New Culture Registers is a visual registry for the future, reframing the cultural legacy of El Salvador during the 1980’s and 90’s using personal and historical archives from a diasporic vantage point. It imprints the rescued archive of the renowned Galeria el laberinto – an epicienter of cultural activity during the Salvadoran civil war – along with my own photographic archive of the time onto the national seismographic record of El Salvador.

    Pulse encapsulates issues of social justice, representation and solidarity that are at stake in the art world and in society. Transnational dialogue and decolonial visual representations are urgent. With 2.3 million Salvadorans living in the United States, we are the third largest Latinx population, often vilified by reductive, dehumanizing narratives of war, violence and migratory “illegality”.

    I challenge erasure, invisibility, prejudice and established canons and territories, paying tribute to my late mother, Janine Janowski and her legacy and founding director of Galeria el laberinto, and to the artists who worked with the gallery during such difficult times. Pulse then, transforms the land into a fully lived and witnessed Thirdspace of memory and art, while mapping personal and collective history into a meeting ground for a more hopeful, nuanced, dignified and restorative future.

    Pulse: Seismic Register 2020.02.26.013 (Terremoto, 1986), 2020
    Pulse: Seismic Register 2020.02.26.135 (Peace, 1992), 2020
    Pulse: No registra temblor, (Homage, Armando Campos), 2020

    Muriel Hasbun’s expertise as an artist and as an educator focuses on issues of cultural identity,
    migration and memory. Through an intergenerational, transnational, and transcultural lens, Hasbun
    constructs contemporary narratives and establishes a space for dialogue where individual and collective memory spark new questions about identity and place.

    Hasbun is the recipient of numerous distinctions, including: the 2021-22 Estelle Lebowitz Endowed Visiting Artist at Rutgers University, a FY21 AHCMC Artist & Scholar Grant, 2020 Sondheim and 2019 Trawick Prize Finalist, a 2019 Archive Transformed CU Boulder Artist/Scholar Collaborative Residency, Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards in Media (2019 and 2008) and in Photography (2015, 2012), CENTER Santa Fe 2018 Producer’s Choice and 2017 Curator’s Choice awards, a FY17 Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County Artist Project Grant, a 2014 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, the Howard Chapnick Grant of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund (2014); a Museums Connect grant of the U.S. Department of State and the American Association of Museums (2011-2012); Artist in Residence at the Centro Cultural de España in San Salvador (2016), and the Escuela de Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico (2010); the Corcoran’s Outstanding Creative Research Faculty Award (2007) and a Fulbright Scholar Grant (2006-2008).

    Similarly, her photographs are in numerous private and public collections, including the Art Museum of the Americas, D.C. Art Bank, En Foco, Lehigh University, El Museo del Barrio, International Development Bank, Smithsonian American Art Museum, University of Texas-Austin, Turchin Center for the Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
    Building upon her socially engaged art and teaching practice, Muriel Hasbun is the founder and director of laberinto projects, a transnational, cultural memory, and education initiative that fosters contemporary art practices, social inclusion and dialogue in El Salvador and its U.S. diaspora. She is professor emerita at the GWU Corcoran School of Arts & Design, and previously, professor and chair of photography at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Hasbun received a MFA in Photography (1989) from George Washington University where she studied with Ray K. Metzker (1987-88), and earned an AB in French Literature (1983), cum laude, from Georgetown University.

    Alejandro Luperca Morales

    Alejandro “Luperca” Morales (Ciudad Juárez, 1990) Graduated from the Bachelor of Art Theory and Criticism at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez (2013). He has taken seminars and workshops, in spaces such as Node Center for Curatorial Studies (2015, 2014), FLACSO-17 Institute of Critical Studies (2013) and University of Chile (2012).

    He has given lectures and workshops in spaces such as the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Centro de la Imagen, the Autonomous University of Mexico, Escuela Adolfo Prieto, Alumnos 47 and the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros. He was recently an Artist-in-Residence for the Whitney Museum’s Youth Insights program.

    As an artist, he has participated in the Whitney Biennial 2022 Quiet as it’s kept (New York, 2022); Getxophoto (Basque Country, 2022); Panoramic Festival (Barcelona, 2018); Mexico // The Future is Unwritten (Foundation Benetton Collection, 2015); the XIX and XX Biennial of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia 2014 – 2016); V Festival A-part (France, 2014); the Belo Horizonte International Festival (Brazil, 2013); the Third Juarez Border Biennial – El Paso (Mexico-USA, 2013), among others.

    His book, The portrait of your absence edited by Fernando Gallegos received the Special Mention of the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award 2022

    He was recently awarded the 2022 Photography Acquisition Award by CONARTE, Nuevo León.

    His curatorial projects include Index: Archiving the edges of Violence, Rubin Center (2014); Horror Pleni, EAC (Uruguay, 2015), III Salón ACME (CDMX, 2015), Fallas de Origen, MACJ (2016), Miriam Salado: Detritos, Museo de Arte de Sonora (2016) and Francis Alys, Ciudad Juarez projects, ASU Art Museum ( 2017).  He was selected as International Curator of Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño in Bogotá, Colombia (2015). He founded Proyectos Impala, an exhibition space and mobile library in Ciudad Juárez (2016-2018). He participated in the Mexico Curatorial Intensive of the Independent Curators International in 2017.  

    Nueva Tierra | New Land – Rodrigo Valenzuela

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    Rodrigo Valenzuela works in the fields of photography, video, and installation. His artistic vision is based on the contradictory genres of documentary and fiction. In his new exhibition, New Land, Valenzuela showcases a series of recently commissioned desert images on canvas. These images delve into the intersecting themes of home, man-made borders, and dystopia. 

    About Rodrigo Valenzuela –

    Rodrigo Valenzuela (b.Santiago, Chile 1982) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, where he is the Associate Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA. Valenzuela has been awarded the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship; Joan Mitchell award for painters and sculptors; Art Matters Foundation grant; and Artist trust Innovators Award. Recent solo exhibitions include: New Museum, NY; Lisa Kandlhofer Galerie, Vienna, AU; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene; Orange County Museum; Portland Art Museum; Frye Art Museum, Seattle. Recent residencies include: Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; MacDowell Colony; Bemis Center for contemporary arts; Lightwork; and the Center for Photography at Woodstock.

    The Griffin Museum is excited to announce Rodrigo Valenzuela as our first Cummings Fellow. We are grateful to the Cummings Foundation for their support of the arts and the Griffin Museum. The Cummings Residency program highlights artists of diverse backgrounds and using their specific skill set, work to create a photographically based exhibition as a result of their connection to the Griffin Museum, Winchester and surrounding areas, while engaging in critical dialogues about art and culture with both the youth and adult community they inhabit. Using photography as a bridge to building relationships, the Cummings Fellow creates a series of images opening up the pathways to multicultural understanding and acceptance. The museum and its partners are creating a literacy program centered around imagery, using photography as the tool, working with professional artists to talk about their communities, cultures and new and shared origin stories.

    Wig Heavier Than a Boot

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    Wig Heavier Than a Boot brings together photography and video by David Johnson and poetry by Philip Matthews. As we reveal Petal—a persona as whom Philip writes, and whom David photographs—the project crosses art-making rituals with isolated performances in domestic spaces and pastoral landscapes. Taken together, the images and poems reveal surprising relationships between character, observer, and author. The photographs provide one record of Petal and Philip’s personalities, blurring art-historical feminine / masculine postures and gestures. The poems provide another which elaborates upon the lived experience of performing or, sometimes, obscuring or protecting the self from being seen. Thus, a continuous exchange between photographer and two subjects in one body reflects the complications of power and gender expression through the history of photography.

    About the Collaborators

    David Johnson is an artist, educator, and curator based in Conway, SC. He received an MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis in 2007 and earned his BFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Photography from Texas Christian University. In 2011, David was awarded the Great Rivers Visual Arts Award from the Gateway Foundation. This biennial award culminated with his 2012 exhibition institutional etiquette and strange overtones at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis. Wig Heavier Than a Boot, a collaborative project with poet Philip Matthews, was published by Kris Graves Projects in 2019 and was featured at the Fotofest Biennial 2020 in Houston. The University of Texas Press published Johnson’s second book It Can Be This Way Always: Images from the Kerrville Folk Festival in March of 2021.

    Art Museum Saint Louis, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, National Building Museum in Washington D.C. and Rathaus in Stuttgart, Germany. His work can be found in the collection at The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Don’t Take Pictures, the Humble Arts Foundation, Lenscratch, Photo-emphasis and Fraction Magazine have featured his work online. David has curated exhibitions for Center of Creative Arts, Paul Artspace and the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in St Louis. Currently, Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Coastal Carolina University.

    Philip Matthews is a poet from eastern North Carolina. He is the author of Witch (Alice James Books, 2020) and Wig Heavier Than A Boot (Kris Graves Projects, 2019), a collaboration with photographer David Johnson. Anchored by site-specific meditation and performance, his practice of the past decade has investigated spiritual, queer power, questions of home and ecological shift. He is curious about what happens next.

    Philip is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Peaked Hill Trust and Hemera Foundation. He has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Kansas City Art Institute, and from 2013-16 he organized public programs at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, emphasizing artist-driven thinking, cross-disciplinary collaboration and community-directed action.
    In two 6-month phases over the past three years, he returned to North Carolina to de-hoard his grandmother’s home and repair the physical and energetic infrastructures of a shared family place. This collaborative work with his mother has laid ground for new writing to take root.

    He currently directs programs at Wormfarm Institute, a nonprofit in Sauk County, Wisconsin dedicated to integrating culture and agriculture across the rural-urban continuum. He holds an MFA Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and BA English from Tulane University.

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