Griffin Museum Online

Katalina Simon | Land Beyond the Forest

Posted on August 20, 2020

We are thrilled to be hosting an online conversation with Griffin exhibition artist Katalina Simon tonight, August 20th at 7pm Eastern.

For tickets see the Events page of our website.

Her beautiful series Land Beyond the Forest is hanging in our satellite gallery Griffin @ WinCam here in Winchester. The exhibition ends September 27th. We hope if you get a chance to get to Winchester you stop by and see this lovely body of work.

Katalina Simon is a British/Hungarian photographer whose work centers on the passage of time and cultural memory. Her interest in photography began when, as a child, she was told that taking pictures was not allowed in many public spaces in communist Hungary and she observed how precious photographs were to her family separated by the Iron Curtain.

Simon’s photography emphasizes her strong connection with history and the mood of the environments she photographs. Her image making is only part of a larger goal of experiencing a place, learning about a new culture or community.

Katalina holds a BA in Russian from the University of Bristol in England and is a graduate of the Professional Photography Program at the New York Institute of Photography. She is an exhibited member of the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA, PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont and Fountain Street Gallery in Boston, MA.

The Land Beyond the Forest is an ongoing series depicting a fading way of life in rural Transylvania. This mountainous and remote region of Eastern Europe is steeped in history and lore. The rugged Carpathian Mountains kept invaders at bay and kept the remote villages isolated from the passage of time.

I am drawn time and again to this region and these people because it reminds me of a way of life that I experienced at my grandparent’s village in Hungary every summer. As a child, I was oblivious to the hardships that people faced and experienced only kindness and warmth. With my camera I work to recapture this feeling of storybook wonder and show domestic tableaux and rural people as I remember them.

For this exhibition I am focusing on the last generation of women who live this traditional rural life. My hope is to show the magic and poetry of the women who inhabit the “The Land Beyond the Forest.”

Corona | Dawn Watson

Posted on June 15, 2020

We close out our features on our online Corona exhibition with the powerful and graphic work of Dawn Watson. Message from Grace is a beautiful and unique vision of landscape with a call to action. Her work implores us to look, to experience, to take time and see what is around us. We asked her to be part of our online exhibition because her work shines a light both externally into the world around us, and emotionally radiates the soul of who we are in it. We asked her a few questions about her work, and what is next for her.

How does light play in your work?

I’m drawn to the play at the edge where light and shadow meet. My still life work takes advantage of the natural light that enters my home studio. The incremental, constant change of angle and intensity of direct sunlight or the softer fill of an overcast day means I need to be ever aware and responsive to what will best serve the mood or message. Being outside in the landscape requires the same intuitive presence as I am at the mercy of multiple elements but light is always the first defining aspect that I seek.

The Griffin featured Message from Grace in 2018. Your series plays on light and a new way of seeing our natural world. How did you find your palette to showcase the world around us?

While doing some research, I saw in a photo the color combination of brilliant blues and golds used for the external skin of the Mission satellites orbiting in space. By inverting my photographic image, these same tones appeared in the inverted field with little to no deeper adjustment to the color tone in the images. The reveal of the color negative upended my understanding of the natural elements. Sky became ground, sand a glacier, reflection a galaxy, invasive plant species delicate lacy delights, the brilliant sun a black hole.

In all of your images the combination of science, nature and visual engagement really invites us as viewers to experience and be thoughtful about our shared inhabited spaces. What is your hope for us as viewers to take away from your work?

There is this conversation of call and response in and with the natural world, each other, and the larger human community. How we respond now directly affects our future. Due to excessive human activity, weather intensifies, the world shape shifts and the familiar disappears. What is our relationship to loss, inequities, constant change? Where do we find shelter, sustenance and solace? How do we define beauty? What is its worth as the natural world morphs from the familiar to the unrecognizable and uninhabitable? My hope is this work inspires reflection that motivates action.

In this time of Corona, how do you find light in your day?

Forced confinement has been both a difficult challenge and, paradoxically, a gift granting me the chance to be still, to be quiet. Different each day, I track the passage of time as the sunlight makes it’s marks along the walls, ceiling, floors and furniture. I step outside often, turning towards the sun watching how it catches in the trees, how wind plays with the light.

What is next for you creatively? What are you working on?

Two new series have been gestating for a while. I was unsure of what I wanted to say and thought it best to let things be for a bit. Not until very recently did I reach some clarity. Drift/Bound visually translates my visceral response to how disconnected we feel as recent events have rocked our world. The crumpled, misshapen forms in my prints drift against fields of light and dark, unmoored, as we are, from any familiar world. ReRe is a still life series using saved plastic packaging material, natural elements and found or collected objects. It asks do we repurpose, recycle, redirect, reform and renew or let go of what remains?

About Dawn Watson –

After twenty-five years as a professional dancer, Dawn Watson shifted her artistic practice to photography, finding affinity in the visual storytelling offered by both live performance and the captured image. Watson’s photographic renderings continue to explore form, space, light, movement and storytelling, as she did as a performer. Nature serves as her muse, her subject of concern, a source of solace and healing.

Watson studied photography at the Maine Media Workshop, the ICP (International Center of Photography), as well as the Santa Fe Workshop. Her work has been featured online and in print, including in Lenscratch and The Hand magazine. She has exhibited her photographs and artist books throughout the United States and Europe including the Albrecht-Kemper Museum, A Smith Gallery, Center for Fine Art Photography, PhotoPlace Gallery, Ph21 Gallery, Tilt Gallery, Tang Teaching Museum, and in solo exhibitions at The Griffin Museum of Photography at Greater Boston Stage Company, the Los Angeles Center for Photography and Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts. Her work is held in private collections and at The Lodge at Woodloch.

To see more of Dawn Watson‘s work log onto her website. Follow her on Instagram here.

June Photo Chat Chat | featuring Sean Du, Greg Jundanian, Eric Kunsman & Minny Lee

Posted on May 16, 2020

Once a month we bring together four photographers to talk about their work, and inspire us all creatively. Called the Photo Chat Chat, our next installment happens June 11th. Here is our line up. It promises to be a great conversation.

Canadian Rockies, No. 6 © Sean Du

Sean Du is a landscape photographer whose work aims to reconnect us with nature. His on-going project “Above the Treeline” records, by way of hiking and climbing, the normally unseen views of North America’s mountain wildernesses. Since earning his BFA in photography from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, his work had been exhibited in institutes such as the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California, Los Angeles Center of Photography, the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado, Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, Colorado, and Photographic Center Northwest, in Seattle, Washington. He currently lives in Pasadena, California.

Gregory Jundanian is an emerging artist focused on portraiture with a concentration on communities. His current project, In Their Footsteps, is about his connection to Armenia, and the connection between Armenia and Armenian break-away republic of Artsakh. Other ongoing projects include a series of work on male identity focusing on local area barbershops, and different landscape projects that keep him busy until he can photograph people once again. In
the meantime he is finally fully utilizing his Netflix account.

Jundanian was a 2017 Critical Mass Top 200 finalist with Spoken Word, his work on the poetry slam community in Boston. He also had a solo show with that work at the South Boston Public Library, and has shown both nationally and internationally in group shows. He recently completed his post-bac degree at MassArt, and will be entering an MFA program at the University of Hartford this summer.

East Main St, Rochester, NY ©Eric Kunsman

Eric T. Kunsman (b. 1975) was born and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. While in high school, he was heavily influenced by the death of the steel industry and its place in American history. The exposure to the work of Walker Evans during this time hooked Eric onto photography.

Eric holds his MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and holds an MS in Electronic Publishing/Graphic Arts Media, BS in Biomedical Photography, BFA in Fine Art photography all from the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York.

Currently, he is a photographer and book artist based out of Rochester, New York. Eric works at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) as a Lecturer for the Visual Communications Studies Department at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and is an adjunct professor for the School of Photographic Arts & Sciences. He has owned Booksmart Studio since 2005, which is a fine art digital printing studio, specializing in numerous techniques and services for photographers and book artists on a collaborative basis.

Self-portrait, Asbury Park, NJ , 2012. © Minny Lee

Minny Lee is a lens- based artist who is currently focusing on making artist’s books. Her work contemplates the concepts around time and space and the coexistence of duality. Lee was born and raised in South Korea and obtained an MA in Art History from City College of New York and an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard. Lee was awarded a fellowship from the Reflexions Masterclass in Europe and participated in an artist-in-residence program at Halsnøy Kloster (Norway) and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been exhibited at the Center for Fine Art Photography, Camera Club of New York, Datz Museum of Art (S. Korea), Espacio el Dorado (Colombia), Les Rencontres d’Arles (France), Lishui Photo Festival (China) among other venues. Lee’s artist’s books are in the collection of the International Center of Photography Library, New York Public Library, Special Collections at the University of Arizona, Special Collections at Stanford University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Amon Carter Museum Library, and many other private collections. Lee was based in the greater New York area for more than twenty years and recently relocated to Honolulu, Hawaii.

For more information about the photo chat contact us. If you wish to be a presenter at a future event email us. The chat is free for everyone. Reservations required and can be made on our website.

Corona | Leslie Jean-Bart

Posted on May 14, 2020

In our newest online exhibition, Corona, we seek to illuminate the best part of our lives and lift us out of darkness. This is a difficult time, and we want to let the light in, lifting our souls into the light.

In science terms, a “corona” is a usually colored circle often seen around and close to a luminous body (such as the sun or moon) caused by diffraction produced by suspended droplets or occasionally particles of dust.

There is no greater way to celebrate our exhibition with the first in a series of interviews with the image makers that inspire us, lift us and show us how to find light in our day.

Today’s featured artist is Leslie Jean-Bart. The Griffin first highlighted his work in 2017, and we look back at it today as we talk to Leslie about this series, light and the idea of Corona.

How does light play in your work?

Person and reflection © Leslie Jean-Bart

To have the shadow and the silhouette aligned as wanted, I needed not just the light, but also a certain angle of the light.

I never fail to see, to observe, and to follow the light. The presence and/or the lack of the presence of light at any degree is the key to it all for me. It is one of the fundamental elements that currently informs most of my work.

In your series Reality & Imagination you use the tidal reflection to illuminate life. Did you find the reflection first? Or did the reflections find you?

The most effective and efficient way for me to answer this second question about my use of the tidal reflection to illuminate life and as to whether I found the reflection first or the other way around would perhaps be for me to speak a bit in general about the framework of the segments of “Reality & Imagination” that these images are a part of.

My process there is a way of seeing driven by a frame of mind at the service of an idea. What I mean exactly is, I chose to accept the upside down world to being as important as if not more so than the right-side up world (frame of mind) as a context within which to explore the interaction that takes place between the culture of the host country and the culture of the immigrant living permanently abroad (idea), while I make use of the movement/motion of the tide with the sand to combine that frame of mind with that idea to tease life from the combination (way of seeing). Because of the frame of mind in use, the images created pull the viewer into a world that seems instantaneously both familiar and unfamiliar. The essence of creating that world is not only in the physical aspect of making the image, but even more so, in the frame of mind that permits me to find the suitable environment to interplay the combined elements.

Of course, light, timing, composition, patience, purpose, idea(s), being in the moment, being flexible, are all engaged in creating the image as the tide continuously and rapidly transforms each tableau anew in a fraction of a second. I have to remain focused and be present.

How did you first find the idea to capture contrast in organic shape and texture with the hard edge of light reflection?

It all came about by my need to support the phase of the idea I was exploring at that particular time.

There were a myriad of possibilities in the surroundings of the tide. It was simply a matter of observing, closely evaluating, and selecting an appropriate form(s).

How can a dominant culture be defined vs a culture that’s a guest? After careful evaluation, it was an obvious choice. A silhouette which is more solid, was to represent the host culture. The shadow which is more transparent was to represent the guest culture. By the way, both the silhouette as well as the shadow cannot exist without the presence of light. So there is a common need there. A common need also exists between the host culture and the immigrant culture. The Corona virus has made that definitely overtly apparent.

As I worked on each segment I mentally assigned a very loose characteristic or definition to that given segment. One segment was, say, where the host culture was in charge/doing the viewing, another was the immigrant interacting/doing the watching within the host culture, another was the immigrant culture interacting within its own community. How and what I shot at that particular time was very much influenced by the loose characteristics I assigned to that segment and whatever related thoughts were wafting in my mind on that subject.

But no matter how loose the given characteristics or definitions were, there is one physical element that I always defined for myself in a singular fashion. That element was the thin white/silvery line of light that sliced in one fashion or another through the frame. I always saw it in some form or another as the dividing line, as the border and entry point between the two cultures.

As a way to give a better understanding of what goes on during the actual shoot, let’s follow through with the last line from my answer to question above, “I have to remain focused and be present”.

My being completely present means that all research done and/or any thoughts about particular idea(s) are relegated to the deep recess of the mind. It is as if all information were stored in the electronic cloud, and the pertinent bit of information automatically downloaded itself to fluidly inform the image making process. The downloading happened so fluidly pure and fast that physical recognition at that particular moment is of no practical use and so that physical function is disengaged. (Only at the end of the shooting day while reviewing the images does the physical consciousness fully reengaged in that process, and the image files completely expanded themselves to fully reveal their contents. As I focus on an image of interest during the review, what took place at that moment while shooting is vividly replayed in my head.) It’s a surrender to what is, a surrender to the moment while absolutely not losing oneself.

That process of seeing has also become some sort of a blueprint of life for me. I always try to remain open, and to remain present, without losing a sense of myself.

In this time of Corona, how do you find light in your day?

I try to create, that always brings in the light, especially when it’s all flowing. But a sure boost is to blast music at a high decibel with the headphone on for a short period of time. Unwise, but it works and it’s fun. Am spending time making videos about what I am doing, and how the shelter-in-place is affecting me.

What is next for you creatively? What are you working on?

I just completed a new series titled “Echoes of Past Present”

Two short videos from the ones I have been making gives a visual idea about the series. Please see links below to view. The first link is the very first video done.

Echoes of Past Present Video One. Echoes of the Past Present Video Two.

About Leslie Jean-Bart

Born in Haiti where he acquired his love for the ocean, Leslie Jean-Bart has been living in New York City since he arrived in the US in 1967. After earning a master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University, Jean-Bart embarked on a photography career that resulted in the creation of images that have garnered awards and recognition.

Earlier days found Jean-Bart on staff at Sotheby’s and Christie’s where he was surrounded daily by the world’s greatest art. Freelance assignments took him all over the world, as he shot for clients in Japan, Brazil, Iceland, Cyprus and Portugal. His commitment to his craft and his defined vision, resulted in a variety of commercial projects, and several published award winning books. A special collage project of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker for the Verve Music Group was cited for excellence.

Jean-Bart began exhibiting in 2001, when a number of his collages were part of the exhibit “Committed To The Image: Contemporary Black Photographers” at The Brooklyn Museum. From 2001-2003 he took part in a number of group exhibits at Monique Goldstrom Gallery
in SoHo, NYC.

During the last several years Jean-Bart put his career, but not his art on hold. Committed to the care of his mother who has dementia, Jean-Bart became her daily guardian. During this very trying time he soothed his soul by photographing water and reflections. The call to somehow combine the ocean or water and the camera was never far from his mind during the past two decades, and in 2009 the call became a mission and a project was birthed.

The ensuing series titled “Reality and Imagination“ is the culmination of years of working the science and magic that is photography and a never ending love of water, light, shape, form and collage.

To see more of Leslie Jean-Bart‘s work, visit his website.

Bill Franson | Mason Dixon Line

Posted on May 13, 2020

The Griffin Museum continues to bring creativity to the photo community through our Artist Conversations. May 17th is the next installment, presenting photographer Bill Franson. The conversation will focus on his series of photographs along the Mason Dixon line. Hoping to get a preview of this what promises to be an engaging conversation, we asked Bill a series of questions. For more information and tickets, see our events page for more information.

What drew you to the Mason Dixon line to create this series. Why did you not take a more traditional tack and follow the line? What was it that led you to its periphery?

My older son was in college in N. Carolina and every year I’d travel down to drop him off or pick him up and during the solo portion of the trip I would slowly wander, taking a few days photographing along the backroads of the South. Crossing the Maryland/Pennsylvania border I’d usually see a Mason Dixon sign and I got curious and discovered the Line predated the Civil War by one hundred years, predated the Revolutionary War by about ten.

Marydel, MD © Bill Franson

How could that be, when most of what we hear about the Mason Dixon Line is related to the Civil War? It was fascinating to discover that the intention of the line was to end a violent land dispute between two families, the Penns and the Calverts, whose land grants were ill defined. The astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon were sent from England to “draw” the line, utilizing the stars to establish their position. By the early 1800s the Mason Dixon Line was already considered a demarcation between free states and slave states, now a dispute over human property. Land as property and slaves as property and never mind the indigenous tribes!

Granite mile stones were placed every mile, larger crown stone every five. My original intent was to discover as many of these stones as I could, an attempt to touch history, and simply look around and see. I discovered two things. One is that over time property overlaid property, and many of the stones were not publicly accessible. The second is very few roads follow the Mason Dixon Line, which leads me finally to answer why I photographed the periphery. Because it is what I could do. It was very exciting to come across a mile or crown stone but much more exciting to park my car in a border town, wander, and photograph what caught my eye. As I followed the line west or south, I was literally spinning circles over the line, stopping, wandering, moving on.

The Mason Dixon Line lives in a historical context like a story in a book, for most Americans. Your work is not to document the line so much as to explore the edges. How do you seek to visualize the line in context of that historic demarcation?

Waynesboro, PA © Bill Franson

The Mason Dixon Line is as mythic as it is historic, and the line is blurry between the mythic and the historic. If I am working within a documentary tradition I am, with all humility, following Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. Photographs can describe accurately, and suggest poetically. I’m all for the later, within the former. I never want to hit someone over the head with one interpretation.

Do you have a single image you go back to again and again as a personal favorite? What is it about the image? Composition, timing or was it in the capture, the moment of shutter release?

I often tell students as they are working on a project that there are “sticky” photographs and there are “stand alone” photographs, both have their functions. Mason-Dixon: American Fictions contain both, the sticky ones are supportive, the stand alone’s are iconic. Even though the project is five years old the difference is still pretty fluid. When you ask what it is about certain favorite photographs, the composition, timing, moment of shutter release, my hope is I can suck my audience in to that moment, to feel me there, the now when all of that collides. When I look at photographs, that is what I imagine, and it’s an electric thrill.

You work in black and white. What is it about the absence of color that illuminates your narrative?

Why black and white? There are several reasons for this, (a) that I consider black and white to be one step of abstraction away from experience, and more poetic, for me. There are photographers working in color who make amazingly poetic images. (b) I prefer the darkroom to the computer screen as a working environment, (c) maybe most important, I think working within limitations is critically important for creative endeavors. The encouragement that one can do anything with a digital image gives me hives, a sandbox has edges.

You shoot many images interspersing churches, religion or expressions of faith combined with the local surroundings. I see you also have a series on HolyLand. How does faith play into this work?

On the presence of religious symbols, churches, expressions of faith in my photographs: A simple answer is that churches, crosses, faith expressions are as abundant as the flag. The Christian religion and American pride feel like the warp and weft of the culture within this section of the United States. I’m actually very conscious of how many images containing flags, crosses, gun culture I make. Do I need more, am I saying something new? I grew up in a Sunday Christian family if you know what I mean. Belief didn’t necessarily extend beyond Sunday.

Like many teenagers I ran away from church soon after my confirmation, only to run back to it in Art School when I started reading the bible backward. A fertile imagination and a sense of a world gone wrong took the apocalyptic vision of the book of Revelation and ran with it. I actually took a break from Art school, eventually transferring to study philosophy looking for answers, diving deeply into the problem of evil, time and eternity, the mind/body problem, language and knowledge. Along the way the qualities of an angry, judgmental, there’s only “one way” God were replaced by compassion, grace. If faith enters into this project I would have to say it is not dogma and judgement but the desire to accept, attempts to be compassionate and open, that have cooled suspicious minds, opened doors, properties, and photographic possibilities.

In building a portrait of this region, what would you like us as viewers to walk away from this series with?

Regarding what I want my viewers to come away from, I’m not sure that has ever been one of my motivations. As a philosophy student “The un-examined life is not worth living”, as a photographer ”The un-photographed life is not worth living.”

About Bill Franson –

“If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself. Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth. For the creative artist there is no poverty — nothing is insignificant or unimportant.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Observe, and get on with it.

This is the short form:
Co-opted the family cameras in my youth. Who doesn’t?
Studied Photography at the Art Institute of Boston and earned a BA in Philosophy at Calvin College in Michigan.

I worked as a staff photographer at several production houses in the Boston area until going out on my own in the mid 90s.
Clients include Johnson & Johnson Innovations, Polaris Venture Partners, Paul Russell and Co., Classic Cars Magazine UK, Childrens Hospital-Boston, Brigham and Womens Hospital, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, Lahey Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, The Peabody Essex Museum, The Boston Globe, Genuine Interactive, The Governors Academy…..

I’ve exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in Massachusetts, Michigan, New York and NYC, New Hampshire, Vermont, Virginia, Texas, and Toronto Canada. Personal highlights have been the Danforth Museum New England Photographers Biennial in 2015, 2011, and 2003, Strange Days at Philips Exeter in 2015, A Nickel and a Kopek at the NESOP Center for Photographic Exhibitions in 2008, Calvin College in 2011, and Panopticon Gallery in 2013. My work resides in various institutional and private collections. In 2014 I curated 21st Century Monochrome, an exhibition at the Barrington Center for the Arts at Gordon College, an exhibit created to highlight select contemporary Boston area photographers and their chosen materials and processes.

In 2006 New England School of Photography offered me a teaching position. I’ve never looked back. Teaching has reconnected me with those who are passionate about image making and actively exploring its possibilities. I taught my last class at NESOP in their 2019 Spring semester, finishing up two days before the school announced that it will close in 2020.

I am currently professor of photography at Gordon College in Wenham, MA. and am represented by Gallery Kayafas in Boston.

You can see more of Bill Franson‘s work on his website.

May Online Photo Chat Chat | Photographers on Photography

Posted on May 5, 2020

Join us Thursday for a online Photo Chat Chat featuring the works of Bootsy Holler, Doug Johnson, Susan May Tell and J.P. Terlizzi.

The Photo Chat Chat is a lively conversation by photographers for photographers and photography lovers. Each artist has a short presentation about their work, process and creativity, and a Q & A session follows, inviting each member of the Chat to ask questions of the presenting artists.

Join us on Thursday May 7th, 2020 at 7pm Eastern / 6pm Central / 5 pm Mountain / 4pm Pacific

Tickets for the event are available here.

Here are the talented artists who will be joining us to discuss their work.

About Bootsy Holler –

Bootsy Holler is an intuitive artist who has been a working photographer for over 25 years in music, editorial, advertising and fine art. Best known for her remarkably sensitive style of portraiture, she has been noticed and awarded by the Society of Photographic Journalism (SPJ) and Association of Alternative News-media (AAN).

Now a fine art photographer her work examines the nature of identity and the reimagined family photo album.

She received her BA with a concentration on Textiles from Western Washington University, Bellingham. After a career as a freelance Director, Producer and Photographer she relocated to Los Angeles to focus on fine art.

About Doug Johnson –

Doug Johnson is a photographer, writer, illustrator, and printmaker currently living in Santa Fe, NM. I have published three books and occasionally write essays about photography, art and the creative process.

Much of my work focuses on the miracle of daily life — how we make our way in the world, safely and sanely. Remarkably, we often do so with kindness, humor, creativity, wisdom, friendship and teamwork. I want to better understand the unique worlds that people create for themselves; to explore the paths they follow or trails they blaze; to record the footprints and artifacts they leave behind. I wonder if they like their job, where they’re going, who cares if they’re sick, what makes them happy, is their family safe, what do they regret, what do they show and hide?

About Susan May Tell –

A visual poet, Susan May Tell was awarded recent artist fellowships to The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Her work is in the Smithsonian Museum’s Samuel Wagstaff Collection; her Oral History and Catalog of Works were acquired by Columbia University.

Tell’s photographs are featured in solo museum and university exhibitions including the Museum of Art / Fort Lauderdale and the University of California / San Francisco, as well as scores of brick-and-mortar galleries coast to coast.

Elizabeth Avedon included them in “fossils of time + light” — a book she curated and designed for the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography.

Tell also had a celebrated 25-year career photographing in more than 20 countries, in the United States, Middle East and Europe, for pre-eminent publications, such as the New York Times, Time and LIFE Magazines. Stories included the women fighters of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, Iran-Iraq war, NBA Finals, actors, politicians, and more. She spent an amazing decade as a staff photographer and photo editor for her home town, in-your-face, newspaper, the New York Post.

Her traveling exhibition, A Requiem: Tribute to the Spiritual Space at Auschwitz, was presented at the Griffin Museum of Photography’s Main Gallery in 2009. In 2021, it will be at the Schumacher Gallery, Capital University. Please contact art2art Circulating Exhibitions, art2art dot org for more information and bookings.

About JP Terlizzi –

JP Terlizzi is a New York City visual artist whose contemporary practice explores themes of memory, relationship, and identity. His images are rooted in the personal and heavily influenced around the notion of home, legacy, and family. He is curious how the past relates and intersects with the present and how that impacts and shapes one’s identity.Born and raised in the farmlands of Central New Jersey, JP earned a BFA in Communication Design at Kutztown University of PA with a background in graphic design and advertising. He has studied photography at both the International Center of Photography in New York and Maine Media College in Rockport, ME.

His work has been exhibited widely in galleries and museums across the United States including juried, invitational and solo exhibitions. JP was recognized and named in The Critical Mass Top 50 (2019, 2018), Critical Mass Finalist (2016, 2015). His work is held in both permanent and private collections across the United States and Canada.

JP is currently represented by Foto Relevance Gallery in Houston TX.

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