Exhibitions
- Museum hours: Tues-Sun*, 10am-5pm. Café Flo hours: Tues-Sun, 11:30am-2:30pm. *The Museum will be open Monday, October 9.
Current 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.
Find out more...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
Find out more...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.
Find out more...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.
Find out more...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.
Find out more...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.
Find out more...