The Virtual Gallery

Aftertaste is a collection of recent lumen prints that explores the ephemeral and nuanced nature of queer relationships. Through portraiture, I photograph several queer men I have encountered in various ways, collaborating with them to create scenes that suggest the aftermath of an intimate encounter.

The work engages with hook-up culture within the queer community, reflecting on the pursuit of immediate intimacy and its complexities. These images aim to capture the intangible “aftertaste” of such encounters—the subtle, lingering moments or personal details that remain in my memory long after we part ways.

The use of lumen prints is both a formal and conceptual choice. The light-sensitive process reflects the fragility of these relationships, as well as the transitory nature of intimacy itself. Through this technique, I aim to romanticize and “queer” these moments, subtly shifting the perspective on these brief instances of intimacy and connection.

The delicate, unpredictable process of creating the prints further evokes the impermanence and vulnerability that often characterize such fleeting encounters.

Read an interview with the artist here.

Jorge Ariel Escobar (b. 1994) is a queer/Latinx image-maker who holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was an Ed-GRS Fellow and received the Temkin Exhibition Award. His photographic work focuses on intimacy and desires, highlighting the ephemeral qualities of short-term romantic encounters between queer men while portraying the male form through a softer lens.

Recent solo exhibitions include the Wriston Art Galleries in Appleton, WI, and the Common Wealth Gallery in Madison, WI. Other credits include group exhibitions at the Trout Museum of Art (Appleton, WI), the Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), Candela Gallery (Richmond, VA), The Image Flow (San Anselmo, CA), and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL).

He has further attended residencies and workshops at AZULE (Hot Springs, NC), Penland School of Craft (Bakersville, NC), and Anderson Ranch Art Center (Snowmass Village, CO). Jorge’s work is included in the permanent collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and was awarded First Place at the TMA Contemporary Exhibition at the Trout Museum of Art.

Jorge currently lives in Milwaukee, WI, where he is a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Follow Jorge on Instagram: @__jorgearielescobar

The Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture is a $20,000 prize awarded annually to a photographer whose work demonstrates a compelling new vision in photographic portraiture. The Prize is generously funded by the Arnold & Augusta Newman Foundation and proudly administered by Maine Media Workshops + College.

The Griffin Museum is pleased to present an online exhibition to recognize the honorable mentions for the Arnold Newman Prize.

Adam Ferguson – Big Sky

My mum was born in Yeoval, a farming village in regional Australia also known as the childhood home of Banjo Paterson, the famous Australian poet who romanticized life in the Australian bush. Every Christmas until my grandfather died, our family would hold a slide night where photographs displayed my grandmother, grandfather and their five daughters dressed in white English pomp for a country show or the horse races. As well as images of my great-grandparents on their wheat and sheep farm. These family memories became my own impressions of the Australian bush and of European settler identity.

My family history epitomizes a social fabric that once enmeshed the Australian Outback and its iconic bush towns. Pastoralism has been an integral part of its history, transforming the region’s environment, culture, workforce, and driving the national economy. The realities of the bush however are complex and layered. The country’s occupation and colonial legacy has caused a deep dispossession of first-nation traditional custodians from their lands, language and culture, and severe degradation of the land.

In recent years globalizing forces such as the centralisation of business, a transition to large-scale mining, the mechanization of farming and a population shift to larger regional centers is reshaping the environmental and cultural landscape of Australia’s outback. The country has also experienced the gamut of extreme weather linked to climate change – bushfires, flooding and drought. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by the end of the century drought will become more common and severe across the planet’s midlatitudes and the subtropics. Australia’s changing landscape is a harbinger of things to come.

Big Sky is both a photographic survey of Australia’s heartland and a response to it’s climate crisis. Through environmental portraiture and formal landscape photography (not included in this submission of portraits) I observe fading yet iconic events, shrinking small-towns, Aboriginal connection to Country, pastoralism, and mining. By presenting a vivid account of Australia in the Anthropocene I attempt to challenge and position archetypal tropes of the Australian identity with the complex realities of contemporary life in the Outback.

– Adam Ferguson

Constance Jaeggi – Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home

Escaramuza, The Poetics of Home considers the Mexican tradition of escaramuza, all-female precision horse riding teams who execute exacting maneuvers while riding sidesaddle at high speed and wearing traditional Mexican attire. Widespread in Mexico, escaramuza is becoming increasingly established in the United States. This work pairs my photographic portraits of US- based escaramuzas with specially commissioned poetry by the Mexican American poets Ire’ne Lara Silva and Angelina Sàenz. In addition, it features mixed media works that highlight excerpts from my extensive interviews with the riders.

These interviews give a broader sense of the escaramuzas’ experiences as women in charrería culture, and either as immigrants, or as first-, second-, or third-generation Americans. The predominantly male national sport of Mexico, charrería emerged from early Mexican cattle ranching activities and was eventually refined and formalized during the post-revolutionary era as a romantic, nationalist expression of lo mexicano (Mexicanness). The escaramuzas speak of the sometimes-frustrating machismo that they have to navigate within their sport. In my photographs I seek to respond to this frustration, to capture the grace and dignity of these women, while reckoning with the gendered complexities of escaramuza within the charrería tradition. Notably, all the women are photographed in formal escaramuza dress—ornate and handcrafted garments that are in many ways emblematic of the social and cultural dimensions, as well as tensions, in their stories. They present themselves formally, and in this sense suggest a certain rigidity and strictness within the tradition. But this formality also describes the escaramuzas’ immense discipline, skill, and precision as riders. Moreover, the beauty of their garments is celebratory and expressive, speaking to the individual and their subjectivity, as well as to the profound sense of belonging that the tradition of escaramuza collectively holds for its practitioners.

My portraits seek to amplify empowerment, and I believe the subjects’ gaze to be central to this. The women confront the camera and own the spaces that they occupy. These choices are significant, as I’ve photographed the escaramuzas within the landscape that, historically, has been the privileged domain of the white male. Given this, escaramuza may be said to represent women’s reclamation of that space, of their right to coexist within it, and to refuse to be confined to the domestic sphere. For all its tradition and formality, I believe that escaramuza is a powerful force for the disruption of established gender roles in charrería.

This sense of defiance—evident above all in the escaramuzas’ dress, location, and pose—is my point of connection to these women. It is where I am present in the work, and the meeting of our gazes in the act of photographing pinpoints this precisely. My lens is a feminist one, and Escaramuza, The Poetics of Home is a feminist project. Specifically, it is a collaborative work between myself, the escaramuzas, and the poets, Ire’ne Lara Silva and Angelina Sàenz, whom I have invited to create prose in response to my images. Ire’ne’s and Angelina’s contributions amplify the voices of the women I’ve photographed, contextualizing their experiences through poetic language.

In addition to photography, the aforementioned mixed media works reaffirm the connection of the tradition of escaramuza to the history of the soldaderas, female fighters in the Mexican Revolution. I’ve colorized gelatin silver prints of historic photographs of soldaderas from the revolutionary era. Similarly to my photographic portraits of the escaramuzas, the soldaderas confront the camera with their gazes. Many of these historical images are of both male and female soldiers. I have chosen to colorize only the women, returning them to life, as such stripping away the nostalgia that is inherent in black and white depiction, bringing greater subjectivity to their portraits. These colorized works are layered with sheer silk onto which are printed excerpts from the interviews I have conducted with the escaramuzas, conceptually merging past to present histories.

– Constance Jaeggi

Barbara Bosworth – Birds and Other Angels 

Birds, to me, are wonderment. A flash of color, a song. I love listening to and looking at birds. Poets and songwriters have rejoiced in the songs of birds since Homer. In painting and literature they have been thought of as messengers from Heaven.

These photographs were taken using an 8×10 film camera while working with bird banders during the annual spring migration. Bird banding is a method of observing birds, providing conservationists and ornithologists with information to protect birds and vital habitat. The researchers catch and then release the birds for the purpose of gathering data to study their behavior, monitor the population and to track migration routes. This data is used for both scientific research and conservation projects and provides a barometer for measuring the health of our natural ecosystems. With the increasingly obvious effect of humans on the course of nature, birds are an important link to understanding our impact.

The first image that entranced me as a child was a print from the 1930’s that hung on my bedroom wall as it had on my father’s childhood wall before me. It was of a young girl sitting, turned backwards on a bench in the woods looking up into a birch tree next to her, looking up at a robin. She was so close she could have reached out and touched it.

Later in life I learned of the paintings of Fra Angelico. In them I saw saints, palms turned toward heaven, at times it seemed reaching for the void, just reaching.

When my mother was failing with Parkinson’s and the dementia had its hold, she would reach out, upwards, as if to hold onto something from heaven. I asked her what she was reaching for she replied Oh! The birds!

And, like the young blind girl in Andre Gide’s story called The Pastoral Symphony, I believe that the songs of the birds are sounds made by the sunlight; from the warmth it gave her skin she believed the air could sing.

Birds open our hearts.

Reaching out, holding on, letting go is what these pictures are about. About loving and losing. I can still see my mother sitting, reaching skyward, heavenward, reaching for the birds.

– Barbara Bosworth

Stas Ginzburg – Sanctuary

For the past four years, I have been making portraits of the LGBTQ+ community during various marches and rallies advocating for the liberation and equality of all oppressed and marginalized peoples. My new series, titled Sanctuary, shifts my focus from the streets to the homes of queer, trans, and non-binary individuals, where they are free to exist in their truth, away from the threat of police violence and the external homophobia and transphobia that still permeate our society.

In these new intimate portraits, I highlight the diversity of the queer and trans experience. Abby is the first transgender rabbi and activist from New York City. John is a bisexual young man from Ohio who lost his left eye due to police violence. Jermaine is a queer disabled organizer born with cerebral palsy who rallied hundreds of people to march in support of Black disabled lives in 2020 and 2021. Jeremy fled gender-based violence in their hometown of New Mexico and now lives in a van along the California coast. Pamela is a transgender Latinx sex worker living in Jackson Heights, Queens.

To create these portraits, I spend time with each individual in their living space, engaging in conversations to build trust and understanding. This approach allows me to capture authentic moments that reflect their true selves and the environments they have crafted, giving the viewer an intimate look into the bedrooms and living rooms of the LGBTQIA+ community. The environments become as important as the people, creating an archive of objects and memorabilia that continue to tell the narrative of the queer and trans experience.

My long-term goal for this project is to present it in book form and as a traveling exhibition. I want people from all walks of life to engage with these diverse perspectives of human existence. At this critical time in our country, when trans healthcare and well-being are continuously threatened by legislation, and homophobia still runs rampant even in large metropolitan areas, it is essential for this community representation to exist and be seen.

– Stas Ginzburg

Sara J. Winston – “Our Body is a Clock”

“Our body is a clock” is a hybrid visual-textual book project of self-portrait photographs made during monthly intravenous medical infusion treatments which started in 2015 to treat Multiple Sclerosis. I make tableaus capturing moments with nurses, my spouse, my mother, my daughter, or in solitude, always against the backdrop of medical care–my IV, bandages, or blood, and the starkness of clinical settings–which juxtapose my appearance of an able bodied young person. Not enough is shown of multiple sclerosis or chronic illness in the mainstream.

The complexities of care and caregiving, and the unfortunate reality that medical care is not a basic human right under the American medical industrial system model have led me to wonder: What does a life of indefinite medicalization look like? And, How do I contend with and accept that reality? Our body is a clock is one way I manage the emotional house of cards tied to disability in a society that lacks an adequate social safety net.

The book will include a conversation between artist Moyra Davey and myself about living with Multiple Sclerosis, a selection from the 13,000 photographs that make up this project, and short pieces of writing that describe the physical and emotional impact of treatment, the curiosity and blurry boundaries of the patient and medical practitioner relationship, and the psychological space of sickness in the American healthcare system.

An excerpt of this project was adapted as  an op-ed for the New York Times that was published in June of 2023. That piece is included in this packet. After it was published I received several hundred emails from people who felt heard, seen, empowered, and hungry to connect with another person who might either help translate their complex experience of illness and healthcare into clear language, or, possibly help them find their way through the system. 

When I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis I was desperate to find examples of photographers depicting their experience of chronic illness by turning the lens back on themselves. I could not find the work I sought. Once I made the decision to use a tripod, a remote, and a professional camera to photograph myself while receiving medical treatment, the result was a type of photograph I had not seen before.

– Sara J. Winston

Leonard Suryajaya – Parting Gift

Parting Gift (currently in progress) is a photographic series that tells a complex story of citizenship renunciation, perseverance, and generational trauma, bound together by a language of love, family, and community. After 18 years in America, I decided to become a naturalized U.S. citizen this year, even despite the rise of fascism. This process will take about two years. Because Indonesia doesn’t recognize dual citizenship, I’d like to make this project my parting gift. Last year, Indonesia passed a law prohibiting extra-marital sex and cohabitation outside of marriage, and the society grows increasingly anti-LGBT. Inspired by these recent developments, I choose to spend six months there with my white, American husband. I’d like to set up a studio practice and face my fears of being an openly queer visual artist and thinker in conservative Indonesia. I am willing to take these risks in order to inspire new perspectives on love, family, and community. Building upon the works and visual language I’ve developed throughout my career, this new project will also facilitate conversations on home, allegiance, belonging, and our collective futures. I will enlist myself, family, friends, and communities in affectionate and fantastical tableaux exploring themes of migration, agony, healing, and camaraderie. The works will be presented in a photo book and in visual art exhibitions that examine sociocultural tensions around identity, acceptance, and kinship from the perspective of a queer Chinese Indonesian immigrant in the United States.

As a second-generation Chinese Indonesian, I grew up a second-class citizen during a period when Chinese culture, language, customs, and identity was banned. I was raised in a Buddhist household and educated in Catholic and Christian schools in the largest Islamic majority country in the world. The discovery of my queerness in an extremely conservative setting further prompted me to move to America. Through perseverance, practice, and passion, I’ve developed a visual language that’s fantastical yet tender, bursting with colors and patterns, meanings, and confusions. I employ the large-format film camera, but unlike Gregory Crewdson’s ambitious movie-set process, my approach is more like a Do-It-Yourself community production of absurdist theatre featuring family, friends, and community. I am the facilitator, photographer, set designer, creative director, and choreographer. The picture frame is my stage and I fill it with humble everyday objects and subjects to find a sense of order in chaos.

Parting Gift takes an original approach in acknowledging the ethnic cleansing towards Chinese minority in Indonesia through a perspective of queerness. The work comprises of tableaux, portraits, self-portraiture, still life, personal family photos and official documents connecting the experience of fleeing and searching for the definition of home. The work is imaginative in the way that it subverts trauma, persecution and dehumanization with perseverance and beauty through the language of family and community. Addressing themes of loss, trauma, family, migration and queerness, the project uses humor, purposeful confusion, role playing and group camaraderie in elaborately staged photographs to inspire new perspectives on love and belonging. The project tells a story of resilience as it challenges the use of identity, family, and community as political weapons to limit, erase and oppress human’s fundamental rights. Furthermore, the project defies the use of AI powered image making and manipulation by employing the human-centered large format photographic process as a mode of portraiture and storytelling.

– Leonard Suryajaya

The Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture is a $20,000 prize awarded annually to a photographer whose work demonstrates a compelling new vision in photographic portraiture. The Prize is generously funded by the Arnold & Augusta Newman Foundation and proudly administered by Maine Media Workshops + College.

The Griffin Museum is pleased to present an online exhibition to honor the three finalists for the Arnold Newman Prize.

Cheryl Mukherji – Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl

My work is an exploration of my origin and inheritance, which is embedded in the figure of my mother. It deals with memory, transgenerational trauma, personal and collective history–and how they inform identity. Using interdisciplinary mediums– such as photography, installations, printmaking, writing, and video–I centre and engage with women’s presence and experiences in the family albums which I brought with me to the United States from India upon immigrating. Family albums–a primary instrument of self-knowledge and representation–celebrate success, leaving out depictions of trauma, grief, and mourning from its pages to perpetuate the myth of an Ideal Family. Like a manifesto, it declares its intentions and motives through candid or staged photographs. In my practice, family albums are an entry way into domestic labour–not washing dishes or cleaning, but the work it takes to stay related to someone, even my mother.

My current project, Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl is an exploration of the legacies and conventions of matrimonial portrait photography in Indian arranged marriages. Inspired by matrimonial photographs of my grandmothers, aunts, and mother from family albums, I reimagine the tradition by staging portraits within my domestic space that often evoke Indian photo studios. The traditional matrimonial photograph acts as a visual currency exchanged between families wherein the prospective bride is expected to perform her desirability, femininity, and domesticity for the male suitor through prescribed gestures and good looks, which comply with Eurocentric beauty standards.

In the work, I explore the politics, aesthetics, and antithesis of desirability pertaining to portraiture in the contemporary context, working through feminist photographs and ‘thirst traps’, alike. Using self-portraiture, I visualize my body in scenes that are complex, exaggerated, and mundane restagings of vernacular and familial matrimonial archives. Focussing on refusal and resistance, the work acts as a counter-archive and emphasises quotidian forms of feminine self-representation through humour, performance, and play.

– Cheryl Mukherji

Preston Gannaway – Remember Me

Remember Me is a longitudinal essay exploring themes of loss, masculinity and mortality. It centers around a boy growing up in New Hampshire following the death of his mother when he was 4 years old. The series is on-going and now in its 19th year.

In early 2006, I was assigned to tell the story of a young couple dealing with terminal cancer while raising three children. I was there when the mother, Carolynne St. Pierre, died and continued to tell the family’s story as her husband Rich and her children, including 4 year-old EJ, struggled to cope with the loss. Through this, we all formed a deep connection. During the time I spent at the St. Pierre house I was often struck by how much closer I felt to the family than my own.

Though that original story was published the following year, and my work since has kept me moving around the country, I’ve regularly traveled back to New Hampshire to photograph. Carolynne endured difficult treatment hoping that she’d be able to imprint her children’s memories. She was afraid that EJ would be too young to remember her. In the photographs that I make now, I am witnessing what Carolynne couldn’t — her son growing up. The work in the years since her death focus on EJ and his relationship with his father, and how, through all his relationships, EJ is finding his own identity and expression of masculinity.

With each passing year, EJ and Rich have come to reflect the struggles endemic to rural and middle-class America. To ease the financial burdens of college, and follow in his father’s footsteps, EJ enlisted in the New Hampshire Air National Guard. Rich is a proponent of the blue collar job training that the military provides. Rich struggles with debt and EJ now needs to contribute financially. A free-thinker and a self-proclaimed feminist, EJ is navigating manhood with the backdrop of Trump nationalism, rampant mass shootings and extreme political polarization.

Memories change over time. Both memory and time have been fundamentally linked to photography since its beginning. Most times I ask EJ, he can’t recall any memories of his mother. He tells me he doesn’t remember a time when I haven’t been making photographs of him. I’m continually questioning the relationship between photographer and “subject,” and am additionally interested in reversing the traditional dynamic of male photographer and female muse.

This story, which is ostensibly about a specific boy, also reflects my own upbringing, and hopefully that of its audience. My own feelings of loss and memory color the images I make of Rich and EJ. The work leverages photography’s capacity for openness and ambiguity, and its resulting ability to deepen empathy and connect us.

– Preston Gannaway

Stacy Kranitz – After a Denied Abortion

These photographs depict the aftermath of a woman forced into a life-threatening pregnancy in the state of Tennessee. In August of 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and triggered Tennessee’s total abortion ban to go into effect. The same lawmakers who voted to ban abortion also voted against a social safety net to support mothers living below the poverty line.

When Mayron Michelle Hollis got pregnant at 31, she was three years sober after first getting hooked on drugs at 12. The state had taken away three of her children, and she was fighting to keep the fourth, a baby girl who was only months old. Amid the turmoil, Mayron learned she was pregnant again. But this time, doctors warned her that her fetus might not make it. The embryo was implanted in scar tissue. There was a high chance the pregnancy could rupture, blowing open her uterus and killing her. The baby, if she survived, would come months early and face serious medical risks. Doctors advised Mayron to terminate her pregnancy. But that same week, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and triggered Tennessee’s total abortion ban to go into effect. Women with means could flee the state. But those like Mayron, with limited resources and lives entangled with the child welfare and criminal justice systems, could not. The same state that questioned her fitness to care for her four children forced Mayron to risk her life to have a fifth.

I met Mayron the day after she gave birth to a 1.5-pound baby girl. The day after, doctors scrambled to save her and the baby’s life. I spent the last year visualizing what life looks like caught inside a system of failed policies that have left Mayron and her family without food and diapers and at constant threat of eviction from their home, all while caring for the fragile life of her baby Elayna. This series of portraits expands our understanding of the complex history of control over women’s bodies by exploring what happens when women are forced to have babies without the resources and support to care for them.

– Stacy Kranitz

This online exhibition of Arthur Griffin’s work is an ode to the summer months approaching and his passion for photographing bodies of water along the east coast of New England. Born in 1903 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Griffin developed into a celebrated photographer through his work for The Boston Globe newspaper and Life and Times magazines. He held a special admiration for photographing the celebration of the summer months by those who enjoyed spending their time by the sea.

Griffin dedicated much of his photography to seaside towns in the summer to capture the happiness and relaxation of those who spent their time vacationing on the water. He specifically photographed these idyllic scenes of small-town charm in New Harbor, Maine.

Griffin also captured people in their elements as they participated in well-loved summertime hobbies such as fishing. He highlighted the interactions of others between themselves and nature while engaging in these activities. Griffin made a point of evoking ideas of tradition and connection for his viewers with such photographs of human bonding activities.

In Biddeford, Maine, Griffin photographed families passing time together on the beach and enjoying themselves, evoking emotions of familial love and ease for his viewers. These photographs also emphasize his tendency to capture horizons as shown in much of his work.

Additionally, Griffin photographed several scenes along the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, during his lifetime whether it be of groups riding horseback or abandoned boats crashing onto the shore. Such photographs highlight moments of movement concentrated into a single image of summertime activities.

To view more of Arthur Griffin’s photography, visit The Arthur Griffin Photo Archive.

Written & Curated by Aiko Dable – Intern, Spring 2024

This online exhibition brings together photographs by Arthur Griffin that capture moments from everyday life in Boston. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Arthur Griffin became a photographer for Boston Globe and the New England photojournalist for Life and Time magazines in the 1930s. Through his lens, Griffin turns simple moments of everyday life into lasting memories.

© Griffin Museum of Photography

Griffin captured views of the Boston Harbor. The architecture of Boston rises in the background while people in the boats are foregrounded. The photograph on the right shows taking a boat tour and enjoying the view of the Boston Harbor was a popular activity back then as much as it is now.

© Griffin Museum of Photography

These photographs capture people engaging in various activities in the city with glimpses of Boston’s streets and old storefronts. The image in the middle captures Paul Revere’s House and visitors around it. The photograph on the right captures the Paul Revere Statue while a group of children are walking past it; the Old North Church is visible in the background. In these compositions, Griffin presents the historic locations as a part of a living city.

© Griffin Museum of Photography

Charles River is another location where Griffin took photographs. He captures groups of people canoeing and enjoying summertime surrounded by blooming trees of Charles River and away from the bustle of the city.

© Griffin Museum of Photography

These two photographs capture the Museum of Fine Arts from afar, while people in the foreground are spending time with friends and family. On the left is a group of children fishing in a pond and on the right are a families having a picnic. The landscape around the museum becomes a peaceful setting for these people to enjoy a day out. The monumental, classical architecture of the museum exemplifies the wide range of buildings present in Boston.

© Griffin Museum of Photography

These photographs were taken at Theater District. On the left is captured a large crowd on a busy street. In contrast to the peaceful views of the city, these provide a glimpse into Boston’s busy downtown and evening crowds. The bright signs create a dazzling, vibrant view, a symbol of life in a bustling city.

To view Arthur Griffin’s photographs visit Arthur Griffin Photo Archive.

Written and Curated by Deniz Bora – Curatorial Intern, Spring 2024

The Griffin Museum team is pleased to present photographs by various Massachusetts-area students in our Virtual Gallery. The in-person showcase will be at Milton Academy Commons Gallery, on view from May 5th – May 31st.

Opening reception and awards ceremony: Sunday, May 5th at 2:00pm. Hope to see you there!

Featuring work from Boston Arts Academy, Brooks School, Buckingham Browne & Nichols, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, Chapel Hill Chauncy Hall School, Concord Carlisle High School, Framingham High School, Groton School, Lexington High School, Marblehead High School, Milton Academy, Norwood High School, Somerset Berkley High School, Waltham High School, The Governor’s Academy, The Rivers School, Winchester High School, & the Winsor School.

The Griffin Museum celebrates the craft of photography and the community it serves in its thirtieth year with our Annual Juried Members Exhibition.

Accompanying the in person exhibition curated and juried by Mazie Harris is an online showcase of 60 of our members curated by Executive Director, Crista Dix. This selection of work highlights the creativity of our members and their unique vision focused on the world around us.

The artists included in this online showcase (in alphabetical order)

Julia Arstorp, Mariette Pathy Allen, Linda Alterwitz, Duygu Aytac, Peter Balentine, Jill Bemis, Adrien Bisson, John Blom, Andrew Brilliant, Adele Quartley Brown, James Byrne, Jessica Cardulucci, Bill Chapman, Gina Cholick, Bill Clark, Ryn Clarke, Susan Irene Correia, Lee Cott, Donna Dangott, Jeremiah Dine, Laura Dodson, Steve Edson, Andrew Foster, Tresha Glenister, Cassandra Goldwater, Greg Heins, Sandy Hill, Susan Isaacson, Dawn Jacobsen, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Greg Jundanian, Jafar Shaghaghi Kayhan, Tira Khan, Molly Lamb, Jeff Larason, Mark Levinson, James Mahoney, Bruce Magnuson, CoCo McCabe, Kay McCabe, Julie McCarter, Jorg Meyer, Lyn Swett Miller, Christopher Morse, RJ Muna, Laila Nahar, Dale Niles, Yana Nosenko, Terrell Otey, David Oxton, Eliott Peacock, Astrid Reischwitz, John Rich, Pip Shepley, Aline Smithson, Lisa Tang Liu and J. David Tabor, Donna Tramontozzi, Phil Tuths, Martha Wakefield and Marsha Wilcox.

A catalog of the 30th Members Juried Exhibition is available featuring the Mazzie Harris exhibition and highlighting the online showcase.

The New England Portfolio Reviews are taking place April 5-7, 2024. We are so pleased to highlight the attendees of the reviews here.

Since 2009 NEPR has been co-produced by the Griffin Museum and the PRC with the mission of bringing reviewers and photographers together from New England and beyond for two days of discussion, networking, and gaining fresh perspective on one’s work. NEPR serves photographers who are just embarking on their careers, and more established photographers, all hoping to reach new audiences and gain fresh perspective on their work. The online format allows for an expansion of participants in volume and in location including reviewers such as gallerists, book publishers, museum professionals, critics, educators and advisors from all over the world who provide guidance and potential opportunities to grow artist practices.

We are pleased to present the 2024 NEPR Artist Index a compendium of the participating artists from across the country along with the six scholarship students from around New England.

The April 5th Keynote Speaker is Accra Shepp, photographer and writer, based in New York where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts. Shepp’s images have been exhibited worldwide in galleries and museums such as the African American Museum, Philadelphia, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum just to name a few. His work is the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other institutions, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times and the New York Review of Books.

Ader la Casa

Fictions constructed to protect, hide or to forget. National myths that become inseparable from personal memories, flooding family albums and burning child fantasies. I can think about the globality of certain tropes as the one of the hero, that same one that attempted to be a father but decided for a public life. This project, Arder la casa, explores the contingencies of political violence in Colombia through my family history and my father’s exile. In 2015, after finishing his term as mayor of a small town bordering Venezuela, my papa crossed the Colombian border — fleeing the political persecution he had been subjected to for decades. I remember him disappearing on different occasions when I was still a child. But fairy tales that my parents told me justified his absence. Now, for the first time, I could understand my family was fragmented and separated in the harshness of a country where political violence reaches the worst statistics in the world. Witchcraft, religion, socialism, and mafia culture are at play within the cultural environment of the story. My father’s exile marks an inflection point from which the project develops. Traveling between past, present, and future, I unveil our history to reveal traces of violence, separation, and cyclical escapes. The project utilizes archives such as pictures or newspaper clippings, paintings, analog photography, video, and sculpture.

Margarita V Beltrán is a Colombian artist and photographer based in Bogotá. Margarita has worked on issues of gender, race and political violence in the context of Colombia and Germany. Her long-term project “Arder la casa, on political violence, family and exile” explores the layers of violence in Colombia through the story of her family, who recognize themselves as victims of the armed conflict. This project was selected by the publishing house Hydra (Mexico) for the creation of a photobook. During her stay in Germany, she developed Reclaiming spaces BIPOC, a photographic project on structural racist violence in eastern Germany, which received funding from the German Ministry of Culture in 2021. She has taught photography with a decolonial approach at Bauhaus University. Margarita has exhibited in Photoville New York, PH Museum Italy, and several galleries and museums in Colombia. Margarita is a member of Diversify Photo and Native Agency.

Tokie Rome-Taylor: Reclamation

Challenging the norms of portraiture, Tokie Rome-Taylor’s work centers themes of ethnography, identity, and representation, as well as their intersections with photography’s influence on perception and public history. In these works, Rome-Taylor photographs children of color as her subjects, calling attention to previous hegemonic histories of the Western gaze. Against opulent backgrounds and adorned in regal attire, her subjects radiate an unwavering majesty, confronting biases and addressing racial gaps in traditional art-historical representation. Rome-Taylor’s work explores the perception of self and belonging, and how these begin in childhood.

Rome-Taylor’s work requires thorough ethnographic and historical research, specifically on the material culture and spiritual practice of enslaved individuals in the 19th century. A distinctive aspect is the depiction of children posing with their family heirlooms. These heirlooms bridge the present to the past, connecting viewers to ancestral stories and traditions. Rome-Taylor’s art becomes a multilayered narrative, not just about individual subjects but a broader exploration of cultural and historical contexts. Through meticulous research and thoughtful composition, she crafts visual stories that transcend time, inviting viewers to reflect on the intricate tapestry of identity and heritage.

As you navigate through these images, ask yourself: how often do you see children of color in historical portraiture? And why -or why not- might that be?

About Tokie Rome-Taylor

Interdisciplinary artist Tokie Rome-Taylor explores themes of time, spirituality, visibility and identity through the foundational medium of photography.

Portraiture, set design, and objects all are a part of Tokie’s photographic practice. Through both digital and alternative processes of image making, textiles, and assemblage, she explores the layered complex relationship African Americans in the diaspora have with the western world. 

Rome-Taylor’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with an exhibition record that includes the, The New Gallery at Austin Peay University, The Hammonds House Museum, The Atlanta Contemporary, the Fralin Museum, The Southeastern Museum of Photography, The Griffin Museum of Photography, SP-Foto SP-Arte Fair in São Paulo, Brazil, and the Zuckerman Museum of Art, amongst others.  Her work is held in multiple public  and private collections including  the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, The Fralin Museum at University of Virginia, and  the Southeastern Museum of Photography.

Rome-Taylor is a 20+ year veteran educator and working artist. 

To see more of Tokie’s portfolio log onto her website and find her on Instagram @tokietstudio