Cyanotype Weekend: Brett Day Windham

Cyanotype Weekend: Brett Day Windham by Vicente CayuelaMay 17, 2025

©Abracadabra, 2022-3. Coﬀee and tea toned cyanotype, watercolor, and pen on Strathmore watercolor paper. 12×14 inches.

This weekend we are highlighting artists featured in the Griffin Museum of Photography‘s recent Anna Atkins 226th birthday exhibition.

Today we give the stage to Rhode Island-based artist Brett Day Windham, an inquisitive creator whose colorful practice revolves around nature, sustainability, and collecting.

Selected artworks are currently on view in Elemental Blues: Contemporary Cyanotypes at the Griffin’s Lafayette City Center satellite gallery, alongside five other artists exploring the visual and poetic possibilities of the medium.

©Brett Day Windham, Family Flowers (Doherty Triptych), 2022, Cyanotype toned with walnut ink and coﬀee, with watercolor on hot press cotton rag, 16 x 20 inches each

Brett Day Windham (born Cambridge, England, raised Providence, Rhode Island) is a multidisciplinary artist currently working with cyanotype. She received a BFA from Hampshire College, a certificate in painting from SACI in Florence, Italy, and an MFA in Sculpture from RISD. Her work has been collected internationally and has been included in shows around the US, including The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Smack Mellon (New York), the RISD Museum (Providence), University of Maine Museum of Art (Bangor), and RMCAD (Denver). Windham received a Dean’s fellowship at RISD and was nominated for the Joan Mitchell MFA Grant. Residencies include The Select Fair Residency (Brooklyn, New York), The Chrysler Museum Glass Studio (Norfolk, Virginia), TSKW (Key West, Florida), Cascina Remondenca (Chiaverano, Italy), and Penland School of Craft. (Penland, North Carolina). Her work has been cited in Art New England, Elle Decor, V Magazine, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Providence Phoenix, Whitewall Magazine, and The Bangor Daily News.

Follow Brett Day Windham on Instagram: @brettwindham

©Brett Day Windham, Electrovetch, 2025 Cyanotype and watercolor on Strathmore hot press, 22 x 30 inches

Artist Statement

Windham’s work is based on ideas around color and collecting. Using an intuitive sense of formal composition, she organizes collections of natural, commercial, and industrial remnants into multi-disciplinary works that confer feelings of mysticism and ritual.

Her current work with hand-painted cyanotypes combines early-process photographs, paintings on paper, and objectless sculpture. Each object is collected, pressed flat until dry if necessary, printed in the sun, washed and dried, and finally painted—a process that can take months to complete. The dried and flattened specimens allow for sharp detail and translucence that informs the painting.

The use of inventive, abstract color is a way to bring this Victorian-era process into the present day. Using modern Japanese, American, and British watercolors in vibrant cadmium, fluorescents, and pastels, the work simultaneously references contemporary painting and the antiquated art of hand-tinted photographs.