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.

September 30, 2023—January 28, 2024

Abandon in Place: The Worlds of Anna Audette

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.

Image: Anna Held Audette (1938—2013), Scrap Metal V, 1990. Oil on canvas, 70 ½ x 80 in., Florence Griswold Museum, Gift of Louis G. Audette, 2022.24

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.

September 1—November 12, 2023

Oceangoing: Art & Archival Collections About Lyme’s Links to the Sea

This presentation of art and archival materials was inspired by the exhibition Object Lessons in American Art: Selections from the Princeton University Art Museum. Highlighting the relationships of a diverse swath of Americans to the sea as a geographical boundary, income source, and provider of food, this archival exhibition examines oceangoing through a local lens to illustrate how Old Lyme, a small town on Long Island Sound, participated in global trade shaping its economy, cultural tastes, and family life.

Ongoing

The Baxter Collection: Selections from the Matthew A. Baxter Bequest

When Trustee Matthew “Andy” Baxter passed away in February 2022, his estate plans included a gift of Lyme School artworks to the Museum. The current installation of selected examples from his bequest of twenty artworks celebrates a cherished friend and supporter of the Museum, whose generosity has now enhanced the permanent collection.

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.

Virtual Tour of the Florence Griswold House

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