Exhibitions

May 11 – September 16, 2018

Art and the New England Farm  

Drawing on the agricultural heritage of Florence Griswold’s family estate and of the Lyme region and beyond, this exhibition examines the history and character of New England’s farms in works by artists from the 19th to the 21st century. Paintings, drawings, and photographs from public and private collections trace the challenges of farming in New England, with its rocky soil, and the pastoral landscapes crafted through intense labor. Landscapes by George Henry Durrie will receive special attention as influential representations that translated the New England farmstead into an American icon in the mid-nineteenth century. Works by Ivan Olinsky, Thomas Nason, Martin Lewis, and Walker Evans will map the transformation and decline of the New England farm into the 20th century with the pressures of urbanization and suburbanization. The more recent revival of farming, with the enthusiasm for organic produce and farm-to-table cooking, will close the exhibition, with the inclusion of works by contemporary artists and photographers, including artist Judy Friday’s project on a year in the life of Lyme’s Tiffany Farm.

Edward Volkert, Ox with Haywagon. Oil on wood, 16 x 20 inches. Florence Griswold Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Freedman, 1984.26

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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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