Exhibitions

September 29, 2018–January 27, 2019 

Paper Trail: American Prints, Drawings, and Watercolors

Works on paper have been cherished in Old Lyme since the Art Colony’s heyday, when artists gathered around Florence Griswold’s parlor table to play the “Wiggle Game”—an amusement where one artist was challenged to finish a drawing of disparate lines begun by another. The Museum’s collection has grown in scope to include Connecticut artists working from colonial times to the present. Sections of this exhibition will make connections between artists across time who shared a love of putting ink, graphite, watercolor, and pastel on paper. In addition to showcasing artists at the Old Lyme Colony, collection highlights include significant gifts of works on paper by Fidelia Bridges, Thomas Nason, and Sol LeWitt.

 

Gabor Peterdi, Red Red Eclipse, 1967. Color etching (soft ground) and aquatint on paper, 17 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches. Florence Griswold Museum, Gift of Charles T. Clark, 2016.8

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February 9–May 12, 2019

The Great Americans: Portraits by Jac Lahav

Jac Lahav’s portrait series The Great Americans plays off of a 2005 Discovery Channel series that encouraged voters to select the country’s leading figures, past and present. In the contest, media personalities like Oprah Winfrey vied with scientists like Jonas Salk, with Winfrey ousting one of the inventors of the polio vaccine from the top ten. In the series, the artist explores the tension and competition between image and reputation, media fame and history. The larger-than-life portraits depict American icons in unexpected ways through dress and pose, often distorting bodies or altering costumes that we’ve come to see as synonymous with the image of figures like George Washington, for example. Lahav is interested in the concept of layering—how individual and group identity are like an onion skin that we can peel away, but whose transparency allows the whole to assume a larger meaning than its parts. By assembling his own unconventional canon of Great Americans, Lahav exposes the clash of image and substance in our contemporary culture.

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June 1–September 8, 2019

Fragile Earth: The Naturalist Impulse in Contemporary Art

Four leading contemporary artists, Mark Dion, James Prosek, Jennifer Angus, and Courtney Mattison will create installations that reflect the vulnerability of our natural world in conversation with the landscape and historic structures of the Florence Griswold Museum. By bringing to the site artists who make natural history their medium, Fragile Earth will illustrate the continued relevance of ecology and nature conservation to contemporary artistic practice and showcase the persuasive and powerful role artists play in advocating for the preservation of our earth by bringing their perspective to natural science.

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