Griffin Gallery

Joshua White’s photographs are a typological study of the plants, animals, and insects that he come across in his daily life and travels. He captures the images with his iPhone. He says that the phone tool seems fitting, serving as a way to bridge his distracted life and his love of science and nature.

White’s series, A Photographic Survey of the American Yard, is featured in the Griffin Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography June 11th through June 29th, 2015. An opening reception will take place on June 11th, 2015 from 7-8:30pm. Joan Fitzsimmons will lead a members’ talk and at 6:15pm before the reception. The talk and reception are free and open to the public.

“I love hearing the cicadas come out in summer, and getting tobacco juice from a grasshopper on my fingers, and catching lightning bugs in a pickle jar,” says White. “The world is full of intricate, remarkable forms,” he says. “We take for granted our place in nature, trading sensitivity to our surroundings for greater productivity and progress.”

Joshua White is an assistant professor in the Studio Art Program at Appalachian State University. He received his BFA from Northern Kentucky University, and an MFA in Photography from Arizona State University. His work explores scientific themes in a poetic way, using sculpture, photography, and mixed media to investigate memory, mortality, ecology, and sustainability. His images have been shown in national venues such as the San Diego Museum of Natural History’s Ordover Gallery and The Huntsville Museum of Art. Recently his work has been featured widely online in publications such as Scientific American, Wired Magazine, Mother Nature Network, and Gizmodo, among others. He lives in works near Boone, NC with his family.

Jeremy Underwood’s photographs are a commentary on what humans leave in the natural landscape. The work aims to challenge viewers to “reflect upon our consumer culture, the relationship we have with our environment and the pervasion of pollution.”

Underwood’s series, Human Debris, is featured in the Griffin Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography April 9th through June 5th, 2015. An opening reception will take place on April 9th, 2015 from 7-8:30pm. Jerry Takigawa will lead an artist talk and gallery tour of the Main Gallery exhibition False Food at 6:00pm before the reception. The talk and reception are free and open to the public. The Griffin Museum will be free to all visitors on April 22nd, 2015 in celebration of Earth Day.

“The project spotlights the environmental condition of Houston’s waterways through the building of site-specific sculptures assembled out of harvested debris collected from the beach,” says Underwood, “Each found material lends itself to a new creation, encompassing the former life of the debris into each sculpture. These objects are simply artifacts to support the work, photographed in interaction with the landscape, then left to be discovered.”

By creating photographs of his sculptures, he invites the community to interact with this project on multiple levels. The pieces he creates continue on as public art within the environment that the debris was found; the conversation about consumer culture and waste then continues in the context of a gallery space. According to Underwood,“ My work embodies our complicated relationship with the environment and the contemporary landscape, focusing on the tension between nature and culture shaping these physical spaces.”

Jeremy received his MFA from the University of Houston and BS from the University of Central Missouri in addition to study at the University of Central Lancashire in England. Underwood has been published in Photo District News and named an emerging talent by Lens Culture magazine. He has received a number of grants and fellowships from such institutions as the Society for Photographic Education, the University of Houston and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. Recent exhibitions include the Houston Center for Photography, Fotofest and the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and has been awarded residency at Yaddo. His recent research project entails collaboration with the Colorado Art Ranch, Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, and the US Fish and Wildlife, exploring wilderness stewardship along Massachusetts’s marine and coastal region.

Kerry Mansfield photographs expired library books that “have traveled through many hands, and across county lines until they have reached their final resting place” as a discard and withdrawn from circulation.

Mansfield’s series, Expired, is featured in the Griffin Gallery at the Griffin Museum January 8 through March 1, 2015. An opening reception with the artists takes place on January 10, 7-8:30 p.m. Magdalena Solé has a gallery talk and tour of Mississippi Delta at 4:00 PM. Brandon Thibodeaux has a gallery talk and tour of When Morning Comes at 5 PM. Bryan David Griffith has a members’ talk on his exhibition The Last Bookstores at 6:15 PM. The talks are FREE.

“The first rite of passage upon learning how to write one’s name was to inscribe it on a library check-out card promising the book’s safe journey and return,” says Mansfield. “I remember reading the list of names that had come before me and cradling the feeling that I was a part of this book’s history and it’s shared, communal experience,” she says.
“[The books in Expired] show the evidence of everyone that has touched them, because they were well read, and often well loved,” says Mansfield. “They were not left on shelves, untouched. Now they have a new life, as portraits of the unique shared experience found only in a library book,” she says.

Kerry Mansfield lives in San Francisco, CA. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in photography. She also studied architecture at California College of the Arts. Mansfield has had exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and South America. Her work has garnered several national and international awards including the Lens Culture Single Image Award, First Place IPA in the Fine Art Professional Self-Portrait Category, the Worldwide Photography Gala First Place Storyteller Award and a spot on the Shortlist in the Professional Documentary Portrait category for the 2012 World Photography Organization (WPO) Awards. “Expired “was featured on the New York Times Lens Blog in 2013. The Filter Photo Festival in Chicago awarded this exhibition, at the Griffin Museum.

Meg Birnbaum is a fine art photographer who over the course of three years has followed and photographed the Boston Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. There are 3000 plus Sisters worldwide with eighteen Sisters, Novices, Postulants and Aspirants in the Boston house on Commonwealth Avenue.

Birnbaum’s series, Sisters of the Commonwealth, is featured in the Griffin Gallery at the Griffin Museum October 14 through December 4, 2014. An opening reception with the artist is October 18, 7-8:30 p.m. Birnbaum will do a gallery talk prior to the opening on October 18^th at 6:15 PM

“The Sisters immediately welcomed me and appointed me their photo historian,” says Meg Birnbaum. “I watch as they artfully manifest into “avatars” of social activism with the seemingly simple goal of inspiring acceptance, compassion and the desire to shift intolerant perspectives while raising money, predominately for causes within the LGBT community,” Birnbaum says. “Photographs, and the human stories behind them can be tools for supporting social change. I hope that by sharing my photographs of the Sisters with the public, that I am contributing to and echoing their desire to build a better world.”

“The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were formed in San Francisco in 1979 as street theatre in a backlash to bigotry and eventually the Sisters became a support system for the AID’s crisis,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography. “Birnbaum’s intimate portraits of the Boston Sisters reveal the giving spirit of the order. They also give voice to their mission that is We love you. We adore you. We respect you. We protect you. We serve you. We are your sisters.”

Meg Birnbaum has had numerous solo exhibitions internationally and her work is held in major museum collections. She teaches in the Photography Atelier at the Griffin Museum and resides in Somerville, Massachusetts. She has recently been “sainted” by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and is called Saint Meg-A-Pixel.

Marjorie Salvaterra is a fine art photographer who according to Aline Smithson of Lenscratch “examines the journey of a woman as wife, mother, and person of the world.” Her images reveal “a fine line between sanity and insanity,” according to Virginia Heckart, Associate Curator of Photography at The Getty Center.

Salvaterra’s series, Her, is featured in the Griffin Gallery at the Griffin Museum July 10 through August 31, 2014. An opening reception with the artist is July 10, 7-8:30 p.m.

Ms. Salvaterra says that she takes inspiration from her own life in her photographs. “I try hard to do the best I can in all the roles of my life,” she says. “Sometimes on a certain day or a certain time of day, I am less than successful. My greatest achievement is as wife and mother of two.” She makes her home in Los Angeles, California.

“Marjorie remains for me a compelling new photographer,” says Kathleen Clark of the Eyeist. “She is capable of both poignancy and a buoyant sense of the absurd.”

A gallery talk by Aline Smithson will take place at 5:30 p.m. on July 10, 2014, prior to the opening reception for all exhibits. Members are free. Nonmembers $7. The reception is free to all.

Paul Adams is an educator and photographer living in Utah. The subject matter of his photographs in exhibition is fashioned from fairy tales led adrift to form alternative narratives.

Adam’s series, Eden Had No Need of Fairy Tales, is featured in the Griffin Gallery at the Griffin Museum June 12 through June 29, 2014. An opening reception is June 18, 2014 at 7-8:30 p.m.

“For this project I returned to imaginative storytelling,” says Paul Adams. “Re-envisioned in contemporary settings, my protagonists [from fairy tales] grapple with the loss of innocence, search for identity, attempt to shape their destinies, and encounter the unexpected,” he says. “My heroes and heroines must work their way through perplexing conditions, disappointment, and compromise to uncover sublime moments of liberation, autonomy, and redemption.”

“In his photography, Adams creates ironic situations with characters that triumph through ingenuity,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography. “The playfulness of each photograph appeals to the child within all of us.”

Paul Adams was awarded a solo exhibition from the Griffin Museum last year from submissions to the 19th Juried Exhibition.

Adams received an MFA in Photography from Utah State University and has taught photography at Utah State University, the Florida Keys, and Brigham Young University. He lived in Europe as a Fulbright scholar and taught photography in Northern England. Mr. Adams has had his work displayed both nationally and internationally and his photographs are included in several permanent collections including the Nora Eccles Museum of Fine Art, Chattahoochee Valley Art Museum, The Chicago Institute of Art, and Brigham Young University Art Museum. Mr. Adams has been a professor of photography at BYU since 2002. Recently his work was chosen for recognition in the 155th Royal Photographic Society’s International Print Exhibition and he received honors from the 2013 International Kontinent Awards, Emerging Focus Photo L.A. International Art Exhibition, and the New York Center For Photographic Arts International Juried Exhibition.