Roberta Griffith

• Name — Roberta Griffith • Birth Name — Roberta Jean Griffith • Born — 1937 • Birthplace — Hillsdale, Michigan, U.S. • Education — University of Michigan, Chouinard Art Institute, Southern Illinois University • Occupation — artist, professor • Employer — Hartwick College (1966–2008)

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.

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."

The first solo show of Griffith's paintings was at the Aspen Gallery in Aspen, Colorado in 1958. Individual exhibitions of her work have appeared at the Yager Museum at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY (1967, 1969, 1994, 2003) 2 Rivers Gallery at the Roberson Museum and Science Center in Binghamton NY (1977), Lycoming College Art Gallery in Williamsport, PA (1981), John Grosvenor Gallery at the State University of New York at Cobleskill (1982), Center Galleries in Albany, NY (1984, 2001), The Art Center Gallery at Endicott College in Beverly, MA (1985), and Winifisky Gallery at Salem State College in Salem, MA (1992). Griffith has had solo exhibitions at the Kauai Museum in Lihu’e (2010) and the Honolulu Museum of Art in Honolulu (2017). 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).