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What a Time It Was
Journals for all reasons
Oprah Magazine article
Exhibit Views History Through
Family of Women
Erie Times-News Sunday article
Cathryn Griffith—Back Bay artist
Finds Herself and Her Future in Her Family
The Back Bay Sun article
An Opus of the Ordinary: Cathryn Griffith
Started With a Family Scrapbook
Erie Times-News Showcase
Cathryn Griffith is
a photographer,
writer and artist living in Boston, Massachusetts.
Please
contact her (email) for information about
the artist’s book, the trade book or the
exhibition.
This online material is for promotional
purposes only. No part of this
material may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means,
electric or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording or any
information
storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from
Cathryn
Griffith.
For more information about Cathryn,
click here.
Photographs and text © Cathryn Griffith. All rights reserved.
Article (right), copyright Oprah Magazine.
February, 2001
What a Time It Was:
Journals For All Reasons
By Alexandra Johnson
Our homes are small, private archives in need of a curator. There are unsorted photos, old passports stamped with the
names of foreign capitals, handwritten letters, thick formal documents stashed deep in drawers. Cathryn Griffith…began sifting through memorabilia because she wanted to leave a chronicle for her college-age daughter.
Griffith found five generations of diaries — including ones carried across the western frontier — genealogy trees, property deeds dating back centuries, stacks of yellowed newspaper clippings. Scattered among them were countless photographs.
October 22, 2006
Exhibit Views History
Through Family of Women
Feature article
By Meg Loncharic
Some of the recurring themes are striking: three successive generations of women raised children as single mothers; two were widowed at an early age; two women, unexpectedly alone, learned to run their late husbands' businesses and continued them as successful enterprises.
Visitors to the exhibit may very well see their own family histories reflected in Griffith's work. Parts of her family story are accessible through recordings of the artist and her daughter reading from Maggie Stone's hand-written journals.
January 5, 2007
Back Bay Artist Finds
Herself and Her Future in
Her Family's Past
By Jenny Desai
For Back Bay artist Cathryn Griffith, studying the past isn't just a way of avoiding the mistakes of previous generations, it's been an ongoing source of inspiration….
At its core, Griffith's work honors challenge, the moments in life when we are left with only our wits and our resources to survive. The more she investigated the lives of the three generations that preceded her, the more she began to see patterns of strength and courage weaving themselves through her family's generations.
April 5, 2007
An Opus of the Ordinary: Cathryn Griffith Started with
a Family Scrapbook
By John Edwards,
contributing writer
When the future becomes hard to imagine, people tend to turn to the past—to nostalgia, history, biography, and genealogy.
What I find most interesting about this project is the way in which it inevitably evolved from a family scrapbook for Griffith's daughter into an exhibition whose implicit nature is a call to us to do likewise.
Our houses…are museums of our lives, and often of the lives of those who've gone before or passed through.