Florence Griswold Museum

The Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, CT is a center for American art and history accredited by the American Association of Museums. Located in a stately Late Georgian mansion designed by Samuel Belcher and built in 1817, the Museum and its grounds served in the early years of the twentieth century as the center for the Lyme Art Colony, one of America’s most famous art colonies. Today, the Florence Griswold Museum is complimented by the contemporary architecture of the award-winning Krieble Gallery and together stand as one of the only places in America where visitors can walk through a landscape setting, view paintings of those landscapes and experience first-hand where a colony of prominent American artists lived and worked. The Museum has been called “Giverny in Connecticut” by the Wall Street Journal, and a “must-see” by the Boston Globe.

The Museum fulfills its institutional goal of fostering an understanding of American art in all its forms by presenting the work of modern and contemporary artists.

Currently, the Museum is featuring Peter Halley: Big Paintings, an exhibition of the contemporary artist, writer, and teacher Peter Halley (born 1953) from February 6 through May 31, 2015.

Drawing on paintings from major public and private collections, the exhibition is a focused look at some of the artist’s most monumental paintings spanning his career from the 1980s to the present day. Since developing his iconic style in the early 1980s, Halley has worked at the forefront of a group of artists reinvigorating American abstraction with a critical lens focused on contemporary culture. Organized by the Museum’s assistant curator Benjamin Colman, this exhibition of nine monumental paintings highlights the evolution of Halley’s bold style and the sophistication of his ideas.