Samantha Joy Groff: True Riches

Raised in a small Pennsylvania Dutch community surrounded by farms and the Mennonite faith, Samantha Joy Groff’s work features animals, plants, and female subjects enmeshed in a knot of competing desires. Her practice pits the conservative values of the Pennsylvania Dutch against contemporary ideals of wealth, family, and desire through the female experience. Drawing on the history of rural painters like Andrew Wyeth and Grant Wood, her paintings resist their austere color palettes, stoic figures, and ubiquitous pastoral landscape compositions. Instead, the work indulges in extreme emotional affect, off-kilter colors, and sensual body/land entanglements. 

In True Riches, Groff investigates traditional Mennonite suspicion of worldliness, a term used to designate attitudes, tendencies, and behavior influenced by the "world”––the evil system of life and conduct opposed to Christ. The idea of the world is used frequently in this sense in the New Testament: Paul (Galatians 1:4) described Christ's saving work as a deliverance "from this present evil world." Jesus said (John 17:16) that His disciples "are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." Groff explores this resistance to modern influences within her extended Mennonite family, and how over the last two decades, she has noticed the world slowly seeping into an otherwise closed community. 

Inspired by a recent trip to Kentucky to visit her cousins, the works in True Riches are based on Groff’s experience during a working holiday spent on their farm to ease the burden of caring for their land in exchange for meals, quality time, and collaborative portrait sessions with her family. Groff observed how her cousins, now young women aged 18 and 21, are beginning to make decisions that will impact the rest of their lives, while under the confinement of their religious upbringing.

Groff’s paintings feel strange because there is no precedent, that she knows of, for representational art in Mennonite tradition. Her figures live simultaneously in a past, present, and somewhere in-between; a push/pull between a modern existence and traditional modes of Mennonite experience. The history of Mennonite art has largely been non-representational and strictly functional, often relegated to the category of craft––quilts, furniture, book making, and bible folk art. Groff draws from traditional depictions of divinity, while resisting ornate iterations of Catholic saints that are often cast in opposition to Mennonite faith. True Riches contends with creating contemporary Christian artwork within a historical culture that refuses idolatry of any kind.