In Place: Contemporary Photographers Envision a Museum

In Place: Contemporary Photographers Envision a Museum brings together artists Tina Barney, Marion Belanger, Adrien Broom, Kate Cordsen, Peter Daitch, Alida Fish, Ted Hendrickson, Sophie T. 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. 

More information about the exhibition is available on the museum website.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website