Griffiths manifests A Yellow Rose into the world

Aug. 28, 2025 — DENTON — It began as a concept for a digital project, an online resource for teachers and photographers to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote.

It expanded into an exhibit, its works to be printed and framed and displayed in galleries.

Now Meg Griffiths is on the eve of seeing years of work published by Texas A&M Press.

“It's like you manifested something into the world,” Griffiths said.

A Yellow Rose Project: Responses, Reflections, and Reactions to the Nineteenth Amendment is the creation of Griffiths, TWU associate professor of photography, and Frances Jakubek, independent curator, art consultant and former director of exhibitions and operations at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York City.

The book’s images are on display in the Fine Arts Building’s galleries through Sept. 5. A book launch and signing will be held on Sept. 4 at 3:30 p.m. in Fine Arts room 101, followed by an artist panel discussion at 5 p.m. in the West Gallery and the exhibit’s closing reception at 6 p.m. The book is available for pre-order through Texas A&M Press and Amazon and is scheduled for publication on Sept. 28.

The project began in 2019, when Griffiths and Jakubek invited more than 200 female photographers to contribute images.

“We’re both artists, but Frances and I run in very different worlds,” Griffiths said. “She's gallery, museum, nonprofit and I'm an educator. These circles overlap, but there are also people that only one of us knew. We reached out to a lot of people because we wanted a really diverse set of people to contribute to the project. We did a lot of research and went on different photo websites, different shows, places where people have won all these prizes.”

When 106 photographers accepted the invitation, the project seemed well underway.

“Then the pandemic happened, and with so many social uprising movements we didn't know if this was going to happen,” Griffiths said.

Naturally, the shutdown dramatically slowed photographers taking and gathering images. But while progress on the project slowed, it never stopped, and images began to arrive. To their mutual surprise, Griffiths and Jakubek agreed on the images they wanted to use in the exhibit.

“Every step of the way, Francis and I were in complete alignment,” Griffiths said. “We never disagreed. It's just been amazing.”

But the project took another turn when Griffiths went looking for an arts and humanities grant to build the website, and someone suggested turning the exhibit into a book. Griffiths and Jakubek wrote a proposal for the TWU Book Series, which enthusiastically supported the idea. Next thing she knew, Texas A&M Press agreed to publish a coffee-table-style edition.

“I got this a few weeks ago and have just been poring over it,” Griffiths said, running her fingers across the cover of the book. “This is a very different experience. Reading through the essays, the cadence of the writing and the contextualization, but also how you engage with print pictures versus something you see online. It's a very personal, intimate experience. For me, it's a lot more emotional going through this book. It's been an emotional process to begin with, working with 106 different artists who have all different kinds of expressions of things they want to say about this moment in time. But the writing really fleshed it out in a completely different way, which was surprisingly more emotional than I thought it would be.

“It’s this thing you birth into the world, and it takes so much energy and time and labor and really physicality too. Writing is very physical, even though people don't think of it like that. It's such a mental process. Photography is very physical. Creating book is a very physical thing.”

And now book and exhibit have been realized.

“I couldn't imagine a better place for the book and the show to launch than here,” Griffiths said. “I just couldn't think of a better audience, and so in alignment with the mission of schools, all these pioneering women who are activists and really amazing in their own right, in different ways, in different fields, and the same for all our artists, the same for the suffragists, and for all my students.”

After such a journey, you’d think Griffiths would be spent, in need of time to not think about what’s next. Think again.

“I feel incredibly energized,” she said. “This is huge. I feel like this was a wave we knew that would be coming and something that we really do want to promote and share as widely and as loudly as possible for as long as we can because we both feel so passionately about it, and I know our artists do too.”