Roberta T. Griffin
Artist
Roberta T. Griffin
Roberta Griffin came to Kennesaw State University after teaching for eight years at Miami-Dade Community College, arriving during a time of transition, when the institution had moved from a junior college to a four-year undergraduate school. She worked to develop the first art major, and continued to create and teach new art history and studio art courses that contributed to the growth of the Department of Visual Arts. It’s B.F.A. program received accreditation from the National Schools of Art and Design in 2002, and now has 500 majors. During this time, she was also Director of Galleries, and curated over than 100 major exhibitions, many with award winning publications. She retired in August 2006, but continues to work with community arts patrons, serving on the board of Friends of the Visual Arts. She is teaching a course in Latin American art in fall 2007.
Professor Griffin was one of the founders of the country study program, “The Year of….” in 1984 and organized a national level art exhibition each year that focused on the art of the country selected, often teaching new art history courses for that particular country as well. She taught in “Summer Studies Abroad in Oaxaca, Mexico” for five years and curated several Latin American exhibitions that received favorable reviews in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Hispanic press. She founded the Latin American Art Circle with a group of Atlanta Hispanic artists in 2001, and the three LAAC exhibitions in the Sturgis Library Gallery received extensive press coverage. In 2005, the gallery received a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the acclaimed exhibition, Merging East and West: The Installations of Chen Zhen in 2006. She also obtained funding from the Georgia Humanities Council for a series of lectures related to the exhibition as part of “The Year of China.”
As gallery director, she was responsible for the donation of 240 works of art, valued at over four million dollars, to the university’s permanent collection, including 97 works by the late Ruth Zuckerman, a nationally noted Atlanta sculptor. Dick and Judy Marks donated 66 art works by major American painters and sculptors created from 1980-1995 and Russell Clayton, a KSU graduate, donated his extensive collection of art by the late Athos Menaboni to Kennesaw State University in 2005. The Woodruff Foundation awarded a one million dollar grant to build the first phase of a 27,500 s.f. art museum that will include a Menaboni Gallery and exhibition space for a portion of the Ruth Zuckerman Collection. It will open in late fall 2007. Professor Griffin created a master plan for a sculpture park on campus through the ongoing project, “Sculpture on the Grounds" and 26 sculptures now enhance the campus.
Roberta Griffin received the Governor's Award for Outstanding Georgia Woman in Art in 1997 and the KSU Distinguished Service Award in 2001. She has exhibited widely, and her art is in the permanent collections of several museums and numerous corporate and private collections. The Sturgis Library Gallery exhibited a thirty year retrospective of her paintings, drawings and prints from June 7-July 26, 2006. Transmutations: The Art of Roberta Griffin received a major review in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.