“Portrait of a Generation” is a painting and drawing exhibition which incorporates other media of sound and video to create a portrait of a generation of American women born between 1933 and 1943.

Deborah Caiola, an experienced portraitist, studied oil painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Caiola invokes her training and experiences in anthropology and social work to create renderings in oil and charcoal that are both realistic and interpretive. “Portrait of a Generation" is a collaboration between Caiola and Dr. Sharon Ravitch, a qualitative researcher trained in narrative portraiture and ethnography at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.

The show, “Portrait of a Generation,” celebrates eleven women from a diverse social, political, and ideological background through a multi-dimensional portrait of painting, drawing, sound, and video. The women featured are part of the silent generation who came of age before the women’s rights movement impacted America’s mainstream. They made their choices of career or family before women in America began to fight for equality in the home and in the work place causing significant shifts in social expectations for all women. Many women who lived through this transition found themselves in an unfamiliar world.

In individual sessions, the women were interviewed extensively and their narratives give voice to their experiences while portraits and sketches give visibility to their lives. While these women were interviewed, Caiola sketched the participants in charcoal and photographed each woman. She then developed oil paintings that are a combination of realist and interpretive, using symbolic images for each woman, her spirit and presence, and her path.

The visual renderings, in their various forms, will be reproduced in a book about the experiences of this decade of the silent generation. In addition to Caiola’s work, Dr. Ravitch documented the interviews of each woman into a written narrative which combined with the reflective writings of the participants will create the text of the book.

Audio tapes edited by artist Jorge Cousineau and a video by Corwin Smith are exhibited to further tell these women’s stories. The paintings, sketches, audio excerpts from the interviews, and the video comprised the multimedia exhibit at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, PA.