The Griffin Museum of Photography invites you to a panel discussion based on Vaughn Sills’ photographs, “Inside Outside.” The panelists are experts in the areas that Vaughn’s work is concerned with: mortality, grief, beauty, and women’s relationship to creating gardens.

The program will take place on the Griffin’s Zoom platform. The program is free to all. Participate by registering on the program event page.

Panel Discussion: “Inside Outside” – Art, Grief, and Our Relationship with the Natural World – Three Perspectives

Paula Tognarelli, Executive Director and Curator of the Griffin Museum of Photography will lead a conversation that will also include time for the audience to participate.

Panelists:

Melchor Quick Hall will use Vaughn’s photographs as a lens to talk about race and gender in our human relationship with gardens, farming, and the greater natural world.

Melchor Quick Hall, author of Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Writing in Darkness, is a Resident Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center. Advocating for food justice and land-based reparations, Hall is part of the Soul Fire Farm Speakers Collective and the Northeast Farmers of Color (NEFOC) network. Her forthcoming anthology, Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism, co-edited with feminist scholar Gwyn Kirk, explores racialized and gendered human relationships to and with nature.

Nancy Frumer Styron, responding to the photographs in Vaughn’s series Inside Outside, will discuss the many layers of loss and grief that many of us live with in this challenging time of the pandemic.

Nancy Frumer Styron, J.D., Psy.D is a licensed psychologist and the Clinical Director of The Children’s Room, a bereavement center in Arlington, MA. Nancy comes with a background in pediatric psychology and specialties in the areas of grief and in oncology. She worked at The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for over 24 years, seeing patients and their families, as outpatients at the Dana-Farber and inpatient at Children’s Hospital, who have been affected by diagnosis, treatment, loss, and death. She also serves as the Training Director for graduate and undergraduate students in the fields of, psychology, social work, and Expressive Arts therapy. Nancy has been a meditation practitioner for over thirty years and has a particular interest in the area of mindful parenting, and teaching meditation to children. Nancy has interests in training in the areas of grief and loss, the importance of leadership in many forms, and in Resource Guided Imagery and Music. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan, an MA in counseling and an advanced graduate certificate in Expressive Arts from Lesley University, a JD from Boston College Law School, and a Psy.D from Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology.

Vaughn Sills will show photographs from “Inside Outside” and describe her art practice — how she makes the images, and the meanings embedded in them.

Vaughn Sills is a photographer and educator whose current exhibit “Inside Outside” is at the Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA, Jan. 20 – Feb. 28. Her previous show “Places for the Spirit, Traditional African American Gardens” was shown at The Griffin Museum in 2019. Her photographs are in a number of collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and Harvard Art Museums. www.vaughnsills.com

Featured image: Parrot Tulips, Northumberland Straight, 2020 ©Vaughn Sills