The Lyman Allyn Art Museum, located just off the south end of campus, currently has three temporary exhibits. All three are worth the short walk, and as Connecticut College students, the Lyman Allyn is free for us to enter with our school-issued ID. The temporary exhibits take up almost the entire second floor of the museum, and each shows a different way identity is expressed and explored.
The Gaze Returned: Portraits from the Collection is an exhibit featuring both completed works, displayed on the gallery’s walls, and the works of visitors, clipped to empty frames to the left of the entrance. Six benches are arranged in the center of the room, each facing a different direction, and each equipped with an easel and mirror. The exhibit explores questions of the artist’s identity. Each work of art shows a specific depiction of the subjects’ identity based how the artist chose to show the subjects. There are different expressions of identity all around the room, ranging from self-portraits to commissioned portraits of politicians wearing their fiercest expressions. The portraits show two points of view at once: they show how the subjects chose to show themselves to the world and how the artist – and by extension, the world – sees the subject. The Lyman Allyn describes the role of portraiture as an art form trying “to show in paint of ink the invisible, tangible qualities on an individual human life.”
There are both paintings and photographs in the collection, the oldest from the 17th century and the newest from the year 2000. All of the works show strikingly and acutely portrayed individuals. The clothing styles and the style of portrait change as the pieces get older, but every single one shows the same thread of human desire to be recognized and celebrated as an individual.
Launchpad of the American Theater: The O’Neill Since 1964 takes up two rooms on the second floor. The first room is small and dark, featuring a screen flashing quotes from myriad celebrities and artists who knew and loved the O’Neill Theater Center. Every quote says something about how the theater was a safe haven for them, a place where they could create, learn and challenge each other in an otherwise ruthless industry. Industrial looking shelves stacked with worn out plays and silver framed photos of celebrities are shoved in the corner. The corner seemed out of place. It was the kind of place I expected to find myself in during a theater professor’s office hours in Palmer.
There’s no noise coming from the projector showing the quotes, so when I heard someone breathing very loudly behind me, I whirled around. Finding no one there, I of course left the room very quickly, only to discover that the noise was some kind of sound effect for a scale model of the O’Neill campus in the second room. I think it’s supposed to sound like waves. The model itself is beautifully detailed and surrounded by pictures of performances and descriptions of the theater’s many annual conferences, including one about puppetry. Glass tables in the center of the room contain black and white prints displaying the O’Neill’s long and impressive history. Shoved in the corner, next to the door so you almost miss them, are two American Theater Wing Tony Awards.
Come in!: Elizabeth Enders Recent Work is the largest of the three current featured exhibits at the Lyman Allyn. One of Enders’ largest paintings is the first thing you see coming up the stairs to the second floor, and two more paintings line the short hallway leading to three long gallery rooms. Enders’ work is diverse. Some of it is childish in the best sense of the word, capturing life in its simplest and most innocent form. Some of it is complex. She mixes her blues with pinks, oranges, greens and reds to give her work the same chilling depth as ice. She paints everything from landscapes to plants to abstract thought. Most of her paintings are oil on linen, but she uses watercolor and pencil with the same mastery. There is even a fourth room, small and dark, with only two little benches, that features a slideshow of photographs on the far wall. Enders selected the photographs herself. They are sketches from her various travels, showing how she keeps a sort of paint journal to remember the feel and spirit of a place so that she can paint it – and do justice to it – later on. Charlotta Kotik, curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, describes Enders’ work as a place where “representation and a nod to abstraction happily coexist.”
Each exhibit focuses on individual expression and identity in different ways, from the introspective and focused portraits, to the art of expression through theater at the O’Neill, to the way that Elizabeth Enders connects her innermost thoughts to aspects of nature and landscape. Identity can be as focused as a photograph or as abstract as Enders’ oil painting Language/Poem/Harbor/Sky. The Lyman Allyn is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10A.M. to 5P.M. Admission is free to Conn students. Take a walk over.
