Free with Museum Admission, no advance reservation required

with Sue Aberbach, Docent

Join Aberbach for a guided tour of the current exhibition Abandon in Place which features large-scale paintings of industrial scenes in Connecticut and elsewhere.

Connecticut artist Anna Held Audette (1938–2013) discerned loveliness in decay, creating large oil paintings of the disused factories, machines, and scrapyards that are America’s ruins. Her works reference the arc of America’s ascendance and decline as a manufacturing titan, a process that transformed our environment through the extraction of resources and the deposit of waste. The often considerable scale of Audette’s works, and their depiction of rusting machines in the workshops or fields in which they were made and used, position her compositions somewhere between landscape, still life, and abstraction.

Learn more about our exhibition Abandon in Place: The Worlds of Anna Audette, on view September 30, 2023—January 28, 2024

Image: Anna Held Audette (1938—2013), Eastern State II, 1999. Oil on canvas, 44 x 36 in. Private Collection. Photograph by Paul Mutino.

This exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of CT Humanities, the Department of Economic and Community Development, Connecticut Office of the Arts, HSB, The Aeroflex Foundation, The David T. Langrock Foundation, Mrs. Kathryn Parsons and Mr. J. Geddes Parsons, Mr. Wayne Harms and Mrs. Barbara Harms, Mr. and Mrs. Jeb Embree, as well as donors to the Museum’s Annual Fund.