April 1 – June 30, 2025
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.
Artist Panel I: May 21, 2025 • 7pm – 8:30pm
Featuring Anna Leigh Clem, Julia Whitney Barnes and Sally Chapman
Artist Panel II: May 28, 2025 • 7pm – 8:30pm
Featuring Bryan Whitney, Brett Windham and Cynthia Katz
The Griffin Museum of Photography proudly presents its inaugural cyanotype exhibition, Elemental Blues: Contemporary Cyanotypes. 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.
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.
Julia Whiney Barnes (Born in Newbury, VT) spent two decades in Brooklyn/NYC before moving to the Hudson Valley in 2015. She received a BFA from Parsons School of Design and MFA from Hunter College. Whitney Barnes works in a variety of media from cyanotypes, watercolor, combined media works on paper, oil paintings, glass, ceramic sculptures, murals, site-specific installations, and limited-edition prints. She has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally including the Albany International Airport /Shaker Heritage Society, Albany, New York; Dorksy Museum, New Paltz, NY; Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT; Hancock Shaker Museum, Berkshires, MA; Woodstock Artists Association & Museum (WAAM), Woodstock, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, ME; Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY; Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Kent, CT; Garvey|Simon NY, New York, NY and Galerie Julian Sander, Cologne, Germany. Her work is in numerous private and public collections.
Whitney Barnes is the recipient of fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Arts Mid-Hudson, Abbey Memorial Fund for Mural Painting/National Academy of Fine Arts, and the Gowanus Public Art Initiative, among others. She completed two significant commissions in 2024 including an immersive double sided glass artwork for Public Art for Public Schools/NYC Percent for Art in Brooklyn, NY and a room-wide mural for the new Vassar College Institute in Poughkeepsie, NY in 2024.
Sally Chapman is a photographer living in Lowell, MA. After earning a BFA in ceramics and photography from Michigan State University, she worked for over twenty years as a ceramic artist exhibiting widely. When she returned to photography ten years ago, she gravitated towards tactile methods of printing. She discovered 19th century photographic process of cyanotype and the flexibility that hand done processes invite a constant experimentation.
She exhibited in the Griffin Museum 30th Annual Juried Members Show 2024 with Honorable Mention; Soho Photo Gallery National Competition 2023, Honorable Mention; Texas Photographic Society, By Hand: Alternative Processes, Honorable Mention; The Halide Project, Living Image, Grand Prize Winner; A Smith Gallery, Directors Award; 18th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, Honorable Mention; and Rockport Art Association and Museum National Show. Excellence in Photography Award.
She has had solo shows at the Soho Photo Gallery, New York, NY; The Halide Project, Philadelphia, PA; Three Stones Gallery, Concord, MA; MIT Rotch Architectural Library, Cambridge, MA; Gallery 93, Brookline, MA; The Sanctuary in Medford, MA; and the Arts League of Lowell, Lowell, MA.
She has been included in many group shows including at the Griffin Museum, Winchester, MA; Image Flow Gallery, Mill Valley, CA; Soho Photo Gallery, New York, NY; Art Intersection, Gilbert, AZ; Light Space, Silver City, NM; Photo Place Gallery, Middlebury, VT; and the Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA.
Brett Day Windham (born Cambridge, England, raised Providence, Rhode Island) is a multidisciplinary artist currently working with cyanotype. She received a BFA from Hampshire College, a certificate in painting from SACI in Florence, Italy, and an MFA in Sculpture from RISD. Her work has been collected internationally and has been included in shows around the US, including The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Smack Mellon (New York), the RISD Museum (Providence), University of Maine Museum of Art (Bangor), and RMCAD (Denver). Windham received a Dean’s fellowship at RISD and was nominated for the Joan Mitchell MFA Grant. Residencies include The Select Fair Residency (Brooklyn, New York), The Chrysler Museum Glass Studio (Norfolk, Virginia), TSKW (Key West, Florida), Cascina Remondenca (Chiaverano, Italy), and Penland School of Craft. (Penland, North Carolina). Her work has been cited in Art New England, Elle Decor, V Magazine, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Providence Phoenix, Whitewall Magazine, and The Bangor Daily News.
Anna Leigh Clem is an artist working in photography, text, book arts, video, and other media to investigate the nature of ephemerality. Compelled by the ineffable secrets embedded in memories, dreams, and the natural world, her work makes tangible these otherwise invisible realms. Born in New York in 1990, Clem currently lives and works on the North Shore of Boston and holds a Master of Fine-Arts in photography and integrated media from Lesley University (2021) and a Bachelor of Fine-Arts in photography from Rochester Institute of Technology (2012). Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally, at venues such as Bromfield Gallery, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Foley Gallery, Visual Studies Workshop, and Elysium Gallery. She has published both trade edition books and artist’s books, several of which are held in collections at The Griffin Museum of Photography, Yale University, SMFA, SVA, and Pratt Institute.
Bryan Whitney is a photographer and artist living and working in New York City whose work often involves experimental imaging techniques, such as x-rays, 3D imagery, virtual reality, and other alternative processes. Whitney holds an MFA in Photography from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and a BA in the Psychology of Art from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has taught photography at Rutgers University and currently teaches at the International Center of Photography in New York City. A recipient of the Fulbright Grant: Lectures on American Photography, he has exhibited across the United States and internationally as well as traveled the globe for special projects, including archeological photo expeditions with the Qatar Museum Authority and the National Agency for Cultural Heritage Preservation, Republic of Georgia. Art exhibitions include various prestigious venues such as the Center for Holography on Governor’s Island, Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe, the Fringe Art Fair in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Islamic Museum of Art in Berlin, Germany. His work has appeared in several media outlets such as Martha Stewart, Harpers Bazaar, Fortune, the New York Times, and in books, posters and advertising campaigns worldwide.
Cynthia Katz is an award-winning photo-based artist working in the Boston area. Process and discovery have been guiding forces that link her photographic practice, artist books, and installations. Her work has been shown regionally and nationally, most recently at Three Stones Gallery, Jessica Hagen Gallery, The Danforth Art Museum, The Fitchburg Art Museum, and Soho Photo Gallery in NYC. Katz’s latest recognition includes being named a finalist and a juror’s pick by LensCulture’s 2024 Art Photography Awards. She was awarded the Photography Prize at the 2024 Fitchburg Art Museum’s summer exhibition, and the first prize in Soho Photo Gallery’s Alt Process Competition in 2024. In 2025, she was selected for recognition at Concord Art’s MJ2 exhibit by juror Crista Dix, executive director at the Griffin Museum of Photography.
Cynthia’s work is published in journals, books and blogs, including Manifest’s International Photography Annual 3, SlowSpace.org and LensCulture. Her presentations include “Handmade Photographs” at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, Three Stones Gallery and Concord Art. Her work is housed in private collections.
In addition to her own practice, Katz was a photo educator in settings that included Art Schools, colleges, and independent high schools. She brings that experience to her work as a portfolio consultant, helping people craft portfolios for college, grad school and art school admissions. Katz holds a BFA in Photography from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA in Photography from Bennington College. She maintains a studio at The Umbrella Arts Center in Concord, MA, is represented by Jessica Hagen Gallery in Newport, RI, and she lives in West Concord, MA.
