Exhibitions

Ongoing

An American Place: The Art Colony at Old Lyme

During the first two decades of the 20th century, the village of Old Lyme, Connecticut was the setting for one of the largest and most significant art colonies in America.

Ongoing

Solitary Garden

As part of our 2021 exhibition Social & Solitary: Reflections on Art, Isolation, and Renewal, the Museum collaborated with the New Orleans-based contemporary artist jackie sumell to install one of her “Solitary Garden” beds on our grounds.

The Solitary Garden project comes to life through correspondence between a volunteer and a currently incarcerated “gardener.” Their letters articulate to the Museum what kinds of flowers or plants are grown in the garden bed. Each Solitary Garden is a gesture of hope connecting an isolated person to the outside world through the restorative act of nurturing plants.

Ongoing

Selections from the Hartford Steam Boiler Collection

The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company’s gift of their 190-piece collection of American paintings, works on paper, and sculpture to the Florence Griswold Museum in 2001 marked a milestone in the Museum’s history. With the arrival of the HSB gift, the scope of the Museum’s collection instantly broadened, both geographically and chronologically, to include artists working in every corner of Connecticut from the 18th- to the mid-20th century. We celebrate these works with a rotating selection from the collection.

Now on View

From Art Colony to Connecticut Collection: Highlights from the Florence Griswold Museum

To increase access to the Museum’s wonderful artworks, the Niblack Gallery in our Robert and Nancy Krieble Gallery will be dedicated to a long-term installation of selections from the permanent collection. From Art Colony to Connecticut Collection presents highlights in three thematic clusters.

Community: the Lyme Art Colony and Beyond includes artworks by Matilda Browne, William Chadwick, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Bessie Potter Vonnoh and others that attest to the creative community centered around Florence Griswold’s riverside boardinghouse circa 1900.

Connecticut and the Environment features paintings, sculpture, video, and material culture objects from the permanent collection that encourage us to consider how artists, their clientele, and the societies from which they sprang from the 19th century to the present, viewed and interacted with nature.

As a museum founded by artists who first came to this place to channel inspiration into creativity over a century ago, we honor The Creative Spark in the exhibition’s third thematic grouping. Using both artworks and objects from our collection of artists’ tools, this section encourages visitors to consider how artists tap into and express creativity.

Image: Mark Dion (born 1961), New England Cabinet of Marine Debris (Lyme Art Colony), 2019. Mixed media, 103 1/2 x 50 5/8 x 25 3/8 in. Florence Griswold Museum, Purchase, 2019.10.

February 22–June 22, 2025

Their Kindred Earth: Photographs by William Earle Williams

Land holds history. Some histories are better known than others, preserved by those who valued particular stories and wanted them remembered. What do we know about the land we live on? Who preceded us and what transpired? History books leave holes and silences along with assumptions that have been passed down for generations. This exhibition aims to fill some of the absences by sharing lesser-known stories about Connecticut and its connections to other regions that played a role in bringing people of color to the shores of the future United States. Art has the power to help us see, and to encourage us to imagine the presence of those who had no agency or opportunity to record their own histories.

Over the past forty years artist William Earle Williams (born 1950) has made sites of African American history more visible through his exquisite photographs. Mentored in the 1970s by the famed photographer Walker Evans, who had a home in Lyme, Williams attended the Yale School of Art at Evans’s suggestion. From that Connecticut inception, Williams embarked on a decades-long journey to identify and photograph places across the country that hold histories of the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, and emancipation.

June 28–September 14

Cow Tales

Inspired by the Museum’s extensive collection of animal paintings by Lyme Art Colony (1900–1937) artists, Cow Tales will explore the subject of cows as compelling subject matter through approximately 30 artworks ranging from the mid-19th century to the present. The exhibition builds on the Museum’s online learning resource Hauling & Harrowing: Edward Volkert and the Connecticut Farm. Like the virtual exhibition, which compiles and analyzes Volkert’s depictions of agriculture from the 1910s–1930s, works in Cow Tales reveals (and conceals!) the era’s complex transition from animal-powered to industrial farming. The exhibition will examine the historic and contemporary tensions evoked by cows through examples by artists such as George Henry Durrie, Aaron Draper Shattuck, William Henry Howe, Matilda Browne, Edward Volkert, Bernard Chaet, Tina Barney, Judy Friday, and Brian Keith Stephens.

Image: William Henry Howe (1846–1929), Repose, September Days in Normandy, 1888–89. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 51 1/4 in. David W. and Mary S. Dangremond Acquisitions Fund

June 28–September 14

Nancy Friese: Living Landscapes

Painter, printmaker, and educator Nancy Friese (b. 1948) immerses viewers in landscapes that percolate with texture and color. Working outdoors, often on large canvases or sheets of watercolor paper, she relies on keen observation and the ability to register the vitality and evanescence of nature through abundant detail and exhilarating hues. Friese’s vivid paintings and prints burst with life, expressing not only how invigorating it is for her as a contemporary artist to make art inspired by nature, but also the vivaciousness of her muse, nature. Friese touches every area of her canvas each time she paints, sustaining as a living thing the landscape that emerges from her brush, even across numerous sittings.

Image: Nancy Friese, Lieutenant River Shore, 2010. Watercolor on paper mounted on linen, 40 x 60 in. Florence Griswold Museum, Purchased with an anonymous gift

Virtual Tour of the Florence Griswold House

Virtual tour of special exhibition Impressionism 150: From Paris to Connecticut & Beyond

Virtual tour of special exhibition Fun & Games? Leo Jensen's Pop Art

Virtual tour of From Art Colony to Connecticut Collection: Highlights from the Florence Griswold Museum

Virtual tour of special exhibition Abandon in Place: The Worlds of Anna Audette

Virtual tour of special exhibition Object Lessons in American Art

Virtual tour of special exhibition Dreams & Memories

Virtual tour of special exhibition Dana Sherwood: Animal Appetites and Other Encounters in Wildness

Virtual tour of special exhibition New London County Quilts & Bed Covers, 1750-1825

Virtual Tour of special exhibition Revisiting America: The Prints of Currier & Ives

Virtual Tour of special exhibition Social & Solitary: Reflections on Art, Isolation, and Renewal,

Virtual Tour of special exhibitions Expanding Horizons: Celebrating 20 Years of the Hartford Steam Boiler Collection and Centennial of the Lyme Art Association Gallery

Expandiendo Horizontes: Celebrando los 20 años de la colección de calderas de vapor de Hartford

Virtual Tour of special exhibition Fresh Fields: American Impressionist Landscapes

Text in English and Spanish

Virtual tour of the special exhibition "Nothing More American"

Virtual tour Jennifer Angus Griswold House Installation

Silver Wings and Golden Scales

Dear Dear Husband

With a Needle & Brush

The Exacting Eye of Walker Evans

Woodrow & Ellen Axson Wilson in Old Lyme