Palate to Palette

There is still time to support the Lyme Art Association and enjoy the special treats they are offering on both platters and walls. Enjoy a sumptuous offering of fine food by the area's top restaurants and caterers, plus a variety of local beer and wine. Event includes a silent auction featuring specially created works of art.

Reservations are $50 per guest ($45 for LAA members) and can be made here.

Participating vendors include: A Thyme to Cook, Coffees Country Market, Fresh Salt, Frommage Fine Foods & Coffee, Gourmet Galley, Haylon's Market, Lillian's Cafe, Old Lyme Inn, Old Lyme Seafood, Saybrook Soup and Sandwich, The Public House Restaurant, Beer by 30 Mile Brewing Co.

Lyme Art Association hosts a diverse schedule of juried art exhibitions with all works for sale by its Member Artists. Further, in keeping with the Association’s commitment to provide a showcase for the exhibition and sale of fine art, the spacious gallery is offered periodically as a gallery for the works of some of the region’s finest and newest representational artists.

Incorporated in 1914, the Lyme Art Association continues the tradition of presenting fine art exhibitions and sales by its artist members in the historic gallery. Exhibitions of Lyme Impressionist paintings began in 1902 and were held every summer in the Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library in Old Lyme until August 6, 1921, when the present Lyme Art Association gallery opened.

American Impressionist painters Gifford Beal, Louis Paul Dessar, Childe Hassam, and Willard L. Metcalf joined with Will Howe Foote, Henry Rankin Poore, Allen B. Talcott, and Carleton Wiggins in the early exhibitions of the Association. The Lyme Art Association gallery was the culmination of seven years of planning by artists Frank Bicknell, William Chadwick, Harry Hoffmann, Wilson Irvine, Lawton Parker, William Robinson, Edward Rook, and Gregory Smith.

The building site was adjacent to Miss Florence Griswold's late Georgian mansion, today a renowned museum of American Impressionism, where many of the artists gathered each summer season. Click here to visit the Florence Griswold Museum’s website. The land was purchased from Miss Florence in 1917.

The building committee chaired by Lawton Parker, worked with architect Charles A. Platt, designer of the Freer Art Gallery in Washington , D.C. and the Lyman Allyn Museum in New London , CT.

The plans for the gallery called for perfect lighting and architectural compatibility with the other buildings in the New England village of Old Lyme . In its review of the opening exhibition, the New York Times praised the gallery as, “an embodiment of art in harmony with its natural surroundings.”

A fourth spacious room, the Goodman Gallery, was built in 1938. It was donated by Mrs. William Owen Goodman in memory of her husband, a Chicago art patron and the Association’s third president. In 1986 the building was named to the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Historic District of Old Lyme, Connecticut.

The mission of the Lyme Art Association is to advance the cause of representational fine arts by owning, maintaining, and preserving an historic building and galleries in Old Lyme, Connecticut, holding art exhibitions, and conducting educational programs for the benefit of the local community and the general public.

Select Photographers Focus Lenses and Imagination on Historic Site’s Landscape, Collections, and Story

 

Tina Barney, The Print Dress, 2016. Chromogenic color print, 40 x 50 inches. Copyright Tina Barney, Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery

The exhibition, In Place: Contemporary Photographers Envision a Museum, on view at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, October 1, 2016, through January 29, 2017, brings together artists Tina Barney, Marion Belanger, Adrien Broom, Kate Cordsen, Peter Daitch, Alida Fish, Ted Hendrickson, Sophie Lvoff, James Welling, and Tom Zetterstrom. The site of the Florence Griswold Museum has been a place of creative inspiration to artists for over a century. The painters of the Lyme Art Colony, who stayed at “Miss Florence’s” boardinghouse beginning in 1899, turned her property and the surrounding landscape into subjects of iconic works of American art. With this history in mind, this select group of photographers was asked to focus their lenses and imagination on the Museum and create work that reacts to the historic site’s landscape, collections, and story. “While motifs of art, history, and landscape emerge in the photographers’ works, the variety of their expressions articulates how multifaceted the discipline of photography is today,” notes Amy Kurtz Lansing, Curator at the Florence Griswold Museum. “Visitors will find a range of art, from representational to abstract, from film to video, and from historical to digital processes.”

In Place came about because of a milestone celebrated recently at the Museum. Eight decades ago, as Florence Griswold neared the end of her life, the riverside property she cherished was sold to pay her mounting debts. Between its founding in the 1940s and the late 1990s, the Florence Griswold Museum gradually reassembled these pieces of land, forming a historic site of over 11 acres. In 2016, the last remaining parcel in private hands was purchased by the Museum, restoring Miss Florence’s original 13-acre estate. Through In Place, the photographers draw attention to unfamiliar edges and hidden treasures, delve into the past, and create narratives that reflect on personal histories and on the legacy of the art colony that came before them. 

Time and Nature

Four photographers, Marion Belanger, Alida Fish, Ted Hendrickson, and Tom Zetterstrom consider the historic site in terms of nature and time’s passage. Belanger immersed herself in the museum’s landscape and collections, creating three studies—Garden Study, Ranch House, and Outside Edge—that appear as printed books (published by Roman Nvmerals), and as photographs on the wall. These images are juxtaposed with a video/sound piece and archival remnants that informed Belanger’s research. Her project investigates how boundaries reflect changes upon the land and demarcate differences between the familiar and the unknown, the contained and the wild. With a wry sense of humor and playing off his interest in the intersections between time and place, Hendrickson surveys the evolution of the museum’s landscape over the course of a year for his Lawn Series. These images and his others demonstrate changes not only in the passage of the seasons, but also the way visitors, and even mice, contemplate, occupy, and modify the landscape. Fish, who is the granddaughter of one of the Lyme Art Colony painters, delves into the artist Willard Metcalf’s naturalist collection, which is housed at the museum. In her work, Fish seeks to create a world of her own invention from these organic materials, stating, “Time has taken its toll on many of the pieces. It is the persistent beauty of the objects that most interests me—especially the fragility of the butterflies and moths.” She shoots with a digital camera, and then turns to historic methods to process the images, transferring her archival pigment print photographs onto oxidized aluminum plates. The product is a unique object with a textured surface and an ethereal silvery hue that echoes that of the moths and butterflies depicted. Zetterstrom is known for his photography of North American trees and landscape, and as an engaged tree preservationist and activist. For him, the Museum’s campus was a rich natural resource to explore and interpret. Zetterstrom choose to shoot in winter in order to better examine the scale and relationship of the trees to the surrounding architecture, a reflection of the artist’s longtime interest in changes to the New England agrarian landscape.

Abstraction and Connection

Kate Cordsen, Peter Daitch, and Sophie Lvoff approached their consideration of place in abstract terms, producing work that takes the museum as a point of departure for formal and conceptual contemplation. Cordsen invokes the abstract works of Harry Holtzman  and Piet Mondrian in the Museum’s collection as the starting point for her work in the historic medium of cyanotype. Using abstract forms, she composes her large-format photographs through a demanding process that requires both physical, painterly dynamism, and chemical precision. In this way, Cordsen explores the tension between chance, accident, and control. For her large-scale Murmurations (Cyanotype on gessoed linen, 51 x 120 inches) Cordsen uses pliage, a fabric folding technique, to create the whirling arcs of the migrating swallows that swoop and soar over the nearby Connecticut River. Daitch takes landscape and architecture as a starting point, but uses his camera to transform and simplify them into formal elements of light, color, and shape. His work recalls that of the Tonalist painters who visited Old Lyme in its rendering of the landscape in subjective terms. Lvoff’s project operates on several levels. She researched Florence Griswold and the community of artists she created, the museum that has grown into, and the town whose enduring tourist appeal derives from those historical connections. Using a historic process, Van Dyke brown prints, in which the photographic emulsion is applied in painterly strokes to create a sepia-toned image, Lvoff replicated transparencies of paintings and historic photographs from the museum’s collection. As a tribute to the legacy of the artists who have come before her, Lvoff took color photographs of icons in the town such as the Griswold house and the First Congregational Church, as well as a barbershop shot in homage to the legendary vernacular photographer Walker Evans, who lived in Lyme. Lvoff’s multimedia installation incorporates postcard records of her research, archival objects, and film footage.

Houses and Stories

Artists Tina Barney, Adrien Broom, and James Welling use the iconic Griswold House as a catalyst for their work. A pioneer of large color photography as fine art, Barney continues her exploration of the visual and emotional connections between people and their surrounds using the historic Griswold House as a backdrop. “I’m interested in relationships, people, the way they move and the way they walk, the way a room is set up. The sociological. It’s like I have blinders on,” Barney states. “I see the formal parts of putting a picture together, paired with the human figure, and human emotions.” Barney describes the Griswold house as a “visual feast” that served as “mysterious and timeless” stage set for her models. Broom, known for her elaborately constructed and often fantastical scenes, uses the Griswold House as a muse for a narrative that invokes memory, loss, and the continuity of relationships over time. A model placed in the historic rooms recalls Florence Griswold and the community of friends she created. Broom’s use of dramatic staging and lighting in her images suggests that the legacy of Miss Florence and the artists poignantly endures. Welling explores the museum and artistic heritage of the area through the lens of family history and his personal experience as an artist who first shot photographs in Old Lyme in the 1970s. A groundbreaking photographer who has pushed the medium in new directions through experimental color photographs and camera-less photograms, Welling returns to conventional methods for his continuing Life Studies series, of which the recent Old Lyme work is part. Welling turns everyday household objects and fragments of architecture into springboards for remembrance, completing a family narrative that began eighty-five years ago when his grandfather studied art with Lyme Impressionist painter Wilson Henry Irvine.

Most of the ten photographers selected for In Place are established artists; they have challenged their medium, constantly exploring technique and theme in new directions prompted by this project. Several are younger, emerging artists who continue to push themselves and their art in exciting ways. In a world where virtual images inundate society through digital channels, these photographers have rediscovered on the viewer’s behalf the inspiring, fulfilling, and thought-provoking potential for connection to place.

Florence Griswold Museum
The recipient of a Trip Advisor 2015 Certificate of Excellence, the Florence Griswold Museum has been called a “Giverny in Connecticut” by the Wall Street Journal, and a “must-see” by the Boston Globe. In addition to the restored Florence Griswold House, the Museum features a gallery for changing art exhibitions, education and landscape centers, a restored artist’s studio, thirteen acres along the Lieutenant River, and extensive gardens. The Museum is located at 96 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, Connecticut. Visit www.FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org for more information.

The 2016 New England Landscape Invitational

Thomas Adkins, Late Winter McGoldrick Farm, oil on linen

The Lyme Art Association, at 90 Lyme Street, Old Lyme Connecticut, will present the 2016 New England Landscape Invitational Exhibition, on view from September 2 through November 18, 2016, with an opening reception on Friday, September 9, from 5 - 7 pm. Works by the Society of Connecticut Sculptors will also be on display throughout the gallery.
 
“The 2016 New England Landscape Invitational focuses on the subject that inspired our founders, the Lyme Impressionists,” stated LAA’s Gallery Manager, Jocelyn Zallinger. “Each year we welcome a number of celebrated landscape artists to participate in this exhibition with our member artists, always making this a competitive and impressive show. Among the artists invited to participate this year are John Traynor, Neal Hughes and Thomas Adkins. Come visit us in our historic galleries and enjoy this highly anticipated exhibition.”
 
All exhibited work is for sale with a portion of proceeds benefitting the Lyme Art Association. From 5 pm on September 9 to 5pm on September 10, artwork may be purchased tax-free.  

The Lyme Art Association was founded in 1914 by the American Impressionists and continues the tradition of exhibiting and selling representational artwork by its members and invited artists, as well as offering art instruction and lectures to the community. The Lyme Art Association is located at 90 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, CT, in a building designed by Charles Adams Platt and located within the town’s historic district. Admission is free with contributions appreciated. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 10 to 5 pm, or by appointment. For more information on exhibitions, purchase of art, art classes, or becoming a member, call 860-434-7802 or visit www.lymeartassociation.org

The Artist's Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887-1920

On the Piazza (Circa 1908)   William Chadwick

The Florence Griswold Museum is the only New England venue for the exhibition, The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887–1920. Organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Artist’s Garden tells the story of American Impressionists and the growing popularity of gardening as a leisure pursuit at the turn of the 20th century. Paintings and stained glass from the Pennsylvania Academy are blended with paintings, sculpture, prints, books, and photographs from the Florence Griswold Museum’s permanent collection, as well as selected private loans. Drawing on new scholarship, The Artist’s Garden considers the role of artists and designers in defining a cultivated landscape in an era of new attitudes toward leisure, labor, and a burgeoning environmentalism.

The Artist’s Garden is the first exhibition to situate discussions of the growth of the Garden Movement within the politics of the Progressive era, with which it overlapped at the turn of the twentieth century. The Progressive era was marked by intense political and social change. Along with the surge of nationalism and patriotic optimism came growing concerns over mass immigration, women’s suffrage, and urbanization. The Garden Movement proposed that the creation of public parks and the hobby of gardening could provide beauty and balance within this fast-changing world. The American Impressionist works in this exhibition demonstrate the profound impact of the Garden Movement on the American culture. “Not only is the Florence Griswold Museum an ideal venue for this exhibition because of its history as a boardinghouse for artists and its restored gardens, but also because Connecticut women like Old Lyme’s Katharine Ludington played an important part in Progressive-era causes such as women’s suffrage while also tending a much loved garden,” said Curator Amy Kurtz Lansing.

Many American artists developed their interest in gardens from their travels overseas. The outdoors became a major subject for Impressionists as they embraced painting outside, or en plein air. Not only does Daniel Garber’s Saint James’s Park, London, 1905 (on loan from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts – PAFA) demonstrate the Impressionists’ careful study of light and quick, loose brushwork, but an attempt to capture the tension within urban life between the realities of development and the desire for pastoral tranquility. Public parks like St. James’s were praised by critics as peaceful oases amid the hectic frenzy of city life.

The grounds of the Florence Griswold Museum provide the perfect accompaniment to The Artist’s Garden. After walking through the restored 1910 garden on the Museum’s campus, visitors will see first-hand in the galleries how artists captured nature’s fleeting beauty on canvas. “Miss Florence’s” lovingly tended garden was a favorite subject for many of the artists of the Lyme Art Colony who stayed at her boardinghouse. One of the paintings on view in the exhibition, William Chadwick’s On the Piazza, ca. 1908 (collection of the Florence Griswold Museum) shows a female model posing on the side porch of the boardinghouse. Chadwick first visited Old Lyme in 1902 and soon became a central figure in this artist colony, along with Childe Hassam, Robert Vonnoh, and other painters who sought the colonial-era architecture and gardens of Old Lyme and their nostalgic suggestions of a simpler, earlier time, far removed from hectic, modern city life. A walk to the Lieutenant River, on the grounds of the Museum, provides further examples of vistas painted by the nature-loving artists.

The Lyman Allyn Art Museum is proud to present a major exhibition of works painted by J. Alden Weir and other American Impressionists in his circle. A Good Summer’s Work: J. Alden Weir, Connecticut Impressionist considers the unique inspiration that American Impressionists drew from the eastern Connecticut landscape.The exhibition, curated by Dr. Anne E. Dawson, Weir scholar and Professor of Art History at Eastern Connecticut State University, brings together for the first time more than forty works from museums and private collections across the country. A Good Summer’s Work opens on May 7 and runs through September 11, 2016. American Impressionist J. Alden Weir (1852-1919) is most often associated with his studio at Weir Farm National Historic Site in Branchville, Connecticut, yet many of the artist’s finest works were created at his little known retreat in Windham, Connecticut, where he painted each summer for nearly four decades.

Many of these paintings are inspired by the beauty of the rural landscape as well as the interplay of industry and nature in places like nearby Willimantic. Prominent artists in Weir’s circle, including John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam and Emil Carlsen, whose paintings are also featured in the exhibition, were frequent visitors to the Windham studio; both Hassam and Carlsen also painted there.

Weir painted some of his finest canvases at his home in Windham in eastern Connecticut’s picturesque ‘Quiet Corner.’ Weir’s eastern Connecticut property was one of two working farms he owned in the state. His Branchville farm, in the western part of the state, is now Weir Farm National Historic Site, Connecticut’s only national park and one of only two national parks devoted to an artist. Shedding light on Weir’s life and work in Windham, A Good Summer’s Work aims to correct an imbalance in Weir scholarship and connect new audiences with Connecticut’s artistic heritage and inspiring natural resources.

 

Drawing on Dr. Dawson’s extensive research, A Good Summer’s Work: J. Alden Weir, Connecticut Impressionist enriches our understanding of the rural retreat movement in Connecticut and introduces new audiences to the ways that artists have found inspiration in its landscape.

The exhibition is accompanied by a companion book, Rare Light: J. Alden Weir in Windham, CT, 1882-1919, edited by Dr. Dawson with essays contributed by other art historians. The book includes all major works from the exhibition and others. An educational website, WeirinWindham.org, and a documentary, “Love at First Sight: J. Alden Weir in Windham, CT,” created by Dr. Dawson and her students, are now available.

Programming for the exhibition will include gallery talks and lectures; a film screening of Connecticut: Season of Light, Betsy White, producer; a bus trip to Weir Farm; subsidized school field trips; adult group tours; hands-on art classes related to exhibit themes and free children’s art activities.
The Weir exhibition has been produced with generous funding from the National Endowment for the Arts; The National Park Service; The Frank Loomis Palmer Fund, Bank of America, Trustee; Hendel’s Inc.; and Americana Furniture.
The Exhibition Opening Reception will be on Friday, May 6th from 5:00 – 7:00pm. Lyman Allyn members are free and non-members are $10. Please RSVP to 860.443.2545 ext. 129.

Connecticut Blacksmiths Exhibition

Guilford Art Center is pleased to announce Connecticut Blacksmiths, an exhibition of works created by Connecticut-based blacksmiths and Guilford Art Center forge instructors and students. Works displayed will range from swords and knives to early-American hardware. The exhibit will be on view February 26 – March 10, 2016 at Guilford Art Center.

The exhibition celebrates the artistry of blacksmithing, a centuries-old practice that has been on the forefront of change throughout history. “People don’t realize that blacksmiths were often the ones experimenting with new materials and processes, in order to create improved products or efficiencies. While many consider it an “old” art, blacksmithing has always been very current. In today’s world, blacksmiths focus on creating specialized and beautiful works using these techniques perfected over time” says Mace Vitale, GAC instructor and forge manager.

Participating blacksmith artists will include Vitale and Matt Parkinson, also a GAC instructor. Both Vitale and Parkinson participated and won an episode of History Channel’s “Forged in Fire”, a nationally-broadcast blacksmith competition. Each “win” brought with it a $10,000 prize. “There is a strong tradition of blacksmithing in our state, and we’re proud to support this art form with this exhibition,” says Maureen Belden, Guilford Art Center Executive Director. “The shoreline area is very fortunate to have a working forge at GAC. We have students of all abilities and ages (including a very popular teen class) taking classes at our forge. It’s a wonderfully supportive and educational place.”

The opening reception is Friday, February 26, 5-7pm; it is free and open to the public. Admission is free. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday 10am-4pm, Sunday 12-4pm.

For more information contact the Guilford Art Center at 203-453-5947.

The Guilford Art Center is a non-profit school, shop and gallery established to nurture and support excellence in the arts. Through classes for adults and children, gallery programs, a shop of contemporary crafts, and special events, the Center fulfills its mission to provide opportunities for the public to participate in the arts, to experience their cultural and historical diversity, and to appreciate the process and product of creative work. It receives support from the Connecticut Dept. of Economic and Community Development.

Wee Faerie Village Returns to the Florence Griswold Museum

Ready to romp through some royal realms?

Follow the Wee Faerie Trail as it leads from one Whimsical Kingdom to the next; from Cinderella’s enchanted castle to Rapunzel’s towering tower to Aladdin’s shimmering palace—all fashioned with an emphasis on natural materials.

Whimsical Kingdoms will feature over two-dozen faerie-scaled castles, towers, and palaces on the Museum’s campus that celebrate fiction’s greatest princes and princesses in a new and imaginative way. Imagine fanciful edifices detailed with mini moats, pinecone pinnacles, fungus fortresses, acorn-topped timbered towers, bark-covered buttresses, fluttering feather flags, driftwood drawbridges…the list goes on and on. Who lives in these Whimsical Kingdoms? The Prince Charmings, Cinderella, Aladdin, King Arthur, Robin Hood, The Little (Petite) Prince, Price Caspian (Narnia), Snow White, Mulan, Belle, The Little Mermaid, The Princess and the Pea, The Snow Queen, The Frog Princess, Tiger Lily (Peter Pan), Rapunzel, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Dracula … the list goes on and on. Some characters have lived in their royal residence from birth. Others have earned their new stately abode through marriage or magic. Either way, the faerie version of these places, keenly crafted of natural materials and set within the nooks and crannies of the Museum’s campus, will present grand structures of wonder…as well as a glimpse into the stories from which they derive.

It will be a grand return to the notion of faerie houses, but on a grand scale…sound the mini-faerie trumpets.

Do you want to be among the first to know about 2015 Wee Faerie Village events at the Florence Griswold Museum? Sign up for their twice-monthly email or Like them on Facebook. Or both!

 

Wee Faerie Admission

During this time, Museum passes, Library passes, 2-for-1 offers, and other discounts apply to the regular admission fee.

Admission includes access to the Wee Faerie Village outdoor exhibition and the special exhibitions in the Krieble Gallery, as well as the historic Florence Griswold House and the rest of the Museum’s facilities. All visitors are responsible for the additional special event admission.

$15 Adults
$14 Seniors (62+)
$13 Students
$5 Members
Children 12 and under are free