Roberta Griffith

Roberta Jean Griffith (born 1937) is an American contemporary artist working in ceramics, painting, drawing, and glass. She is Professor Emerita of Art at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York; where she taught art from 1966 until 2008. She resides in Hawaii and New York state.

Early life and education

Born in Hillsdale, Michigan in 1937, Griffith began drawing and painting in early childhood, winning a competition for a self-portrait when she was ten years old. Her mother and father, a psychologist and steel vendor respectively, supported her interest in art from a young age. Griffith studied drawing and painting at the University of Michigan, withdrawing after two years. She later earned a BFA from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA in 1960 and an MFA degree from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL in 1962.

Work

Griffith’s work combines materials into mixed media installations to tell stories. Griffith has stated that she seeks “to evoke associations of places and their cultural manifestations that [she has] come across through research and world travel, as well as allude to human foibles, human mortality, the cyclical nature of life and death, and universal natural or man-made shortcomings."

Exhibitions

The first solo show of Griffith's paintings was at the Aspen Gallery in Aspen, Colorado in 1958. She has had individual exhibitions at Spanish institutions including the Celler D’en Climent in Gerona (1963), L’Escola Massana in Barcelona (1964), Ateneo de Madrid in Madrid (1964), Camarote Granados Gallery in Barcelona (1974), and the Museu de Ceramica in Barcelona, Spain (1999).