Featured artists

Time for one of the Griffin’s most popular programs, the Photo Chat Chat.

Happening online in the Griffin Zoom Room on October 13th, 2020 at 7pm Eastern, we are bringing the talents of four unique artists Anna Mikuskova, Jennings Sheffield, Kyle Souder and Paul Szynol.

Our Photo Chat Chat is a monthly conversation bringing together four members of the Griffin community to share their work, ideas and creativity with a broader audience. We are thrilled to bring together these four artists who have unique perspectives on creativity and the world they inhabit.

Here is a look at the four artists we are featuring.

Anna Mikuskova is our Griffin Critics Pic on our with a House with No Walls.

Anna Mikušková grew up in the Czech Republic and is currently based in Maine and upstate New York. Before turning to visual arts, she received an MFA in English literature from Masaryk University in Brno. Mikušková studied photography at Maine College of Arts and Maine Media Workshops. For six years, she apprenticed silver gelatin printing with Paul Caponigro – a cooperation that culminated with several group and two-person exhibitions. Currently, she is an MFA candidate in the Photography and Related Media program at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Her work is held in private collections in the United States and the Czech Republic and has been exhibited in galleries across Maine and New York. In 2020, she was awarded the  RIT William A. Reedy Memorial Scholarship and the Pfahl/Richard Stanley Scholarship. Her essays were published in Maine Arts Journal and in the British journal On Landscape.

H. Jennings Sheffield is in the Griffin Cloud Gallery and Virtual Gallery with her work Going Away from Here part one and part two. Sheffield was born in Richmond, Virginia. She is a contemporary artist working in lens-based media, video, and sound. Sheffield received her BFA in photography and digital media from the Atlanta College of Art and her MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in photography and new media. Her core research is highly concept-driven inspired by memory, moment and time and often utilizes familial imagery to convey both the intimacy and the diverse roles and relationships individuals play within a family unit. The methodologies utilized to create her work can take up to two years to complete. As a result, Sheffield periodically takes on landscape-driven projects that begin with just her responding to the landscape. She is interested in landscapes that tend to be fleeting. Similar to her core research, Sheffield approaches the landscapes looking for and observing changes over time.

Sheffield is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Baylor University. Her photographs and work are in several collections throughout the United States and have been exhibited internationally with her latest work exhibiting at The Print Center in Philadelphia; Houston Fine Art Fair; Colorado Photographic Arts Center; Lens Culture; Living Arts of Tulsa; Cambridge University (UK), and Medien Kultur Haus Wels, Austria.

Paul Szynol was last seen at the Griffin with  his series Solitude of Travel.

Paul Szynol is a filmmaker as well as a media and tech lawyer. His films have been featured on the New York Times Op-Docs, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker, and have been shown at festivals internationally, including AFI Docs, Big Sky, Clermont-Ferrand, Doc NYC, Slamdance, and TIFF. His photos have been exhibited in the US and Europe, including ICP in New York City and the Leica Gallery in Warsaw.

Paul was born in Warsaw, Poland, and moved to NYC at the age of 12, the year that the city’s transit fare rose from 75 cents to 90 cents; 33 previously unknown Bach pieces were found in an academic library; and Canon demoed its first digital still camera. Besides New York City and Warsaw, he’s lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Alexandria (VA), Berkeley, New Haven, Philadelphia, NJ, DC, and, for shorter periods, Kampala and Berlin. During his seven drives across the US, he’s visited the vast majority of the contiguous states, and, by train, plane or automobile, he’s also visited some 60 countries. He likes stray dogs, fair use, depressing movies, trains, Greene and Kundera, Uganda, open source software, the Oxford comma, and occasionally translating Polish poetry to English.

Paul is a graduate of Columbia University, where he studied history and philosophy, and Yale Law School, where he focused on free speech and intellectual property, and watched a lot of reruns and depressing movies.

Kyle Souder just recently showcased his work October all Over in the Griffin’s Digital Gallery in May of this year. A Portland, Oregon based photographer, Kyle played bass in math-rock band Duck. Little Brother, Duck! During this time, he toured the US and Japan. It was through these frequent travels, often finding himself on the other side of the camera, that his infatuation with the alchemy of candid photography was rekindled. Kyle prefers to work in the vein of documentary and candid based photography. He is deeply infatuated by the pursuit of serendipitous moments, often finding the camera more capable than his philosophy education in helping to make sense of our shared reality. Kyle recently was awarded a scholarship to attend the CENTER’s 2019 Santa Fe Review.

Kyle is currently working on a book that is an extension of his series October All Over.