Updated May 7th, 2026 — New York City’s Atelier Jolie presents Guestroom by multidisciplinary artist and 2022 Director’s Guest Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Timed with the release of Eliza’s new memoir The Flower Bearers, and curated by Atelier Jolie’s current resident non-profit Catharsis Arts Foundation, Guestroom offers a unique insight into Eliza’s life, community, and commitment to uncompromised creativity. Inhabited by her own works, works from other artists, memorabilia and found objects, the main gallery forms a fictional yet intimate room inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
Defiant of labels, Eliza offers a powerful meditation on being an artist, grief, and the subtle undercurrents of inspiration and fate that make an artist’s work possible. The Elders, especially, play a key role in Eliza’s imagery. Established or anonymous, contemporary or ancient, they are individuals fully committed to the artist life and vocation. A poet, visual artist, author and performer, Eliza continuously engages with these influences in her practice and anchors herself in a plurality of voices – constantly resisting oblivion, silence, and invisibilization.
Eliza honors her influences with relentless devotion, makes room for them and gathers them close – an intentional ritual of kinship and community. Holding her presence, she shapes her own lineage as an artist and chooses her destiny. In this spirit, her curation brings together works by leading contemporary artists Arpita Singh, Francesco Clemente, Henry Taylor, Noah Davis, Nona Faustine and Renée Cox, alongside photographers Lucienne Bloch, Reverend Kenneth F. Hodges and Vivian Maier, as well as other anonymous artists. These pieces exist in dialogue with texts by Audre Lorde, Joy Harjo, Lucille Clifton and Toni Morrison. Eliza’s own work is also present, notably her newest body of work, The Flower Bearers – a series of photographs presented to the public for the first time – which offers a counterpoint to her eponymous new memoir, published on January 20, 2026. Vulnerable and deeply personal, Guestroom also presents artefacts directly extracted from Eliza’s life: her wedding dress, her camera, books, photographs, and more.
