NEW LONDON, CT.- The Lyman Allyn Art Museum opens its first exhibition of 2024 on Saturday, Jan. 13. Norma Morgan in Context celebrates the work of the New Haven, Connecticut-born artist Norma Morgan (1928 – 2017) and considers her dynamic career as a Black female landscape artist and printmaker working at home and abroad. The exhibition, on view through Apr. 7, presents Morgan’s prints and watercolors alongside art by her teachers, colleagues, and other artistic influences, such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Thomas Cole, Stanley William Hayter, Samella Lewis, Richard Howard Hunt, and Robert Blackburn.
Morgan’s evocative prints and watercolors depict powerful and expressive landscapes filled with texture and atmosphere, often focusing on geology and rock formations. She spent several years in the United Kingdom, inspired by rugged landscapes and by the history, literature, and art of the British Isles. Landscapes continued to inspire her after her return to the United States. Based in New York City, Morgan worked episodically in the Catskills for many years, staying in Woodstock, New York, the center of an artists’ colony. There she depicted sites such as Kaaterskill Falls, finding new inspiration in sites made famous by Thomas Cole and other 19th-century Hudson River School artists.
Norma Morgan was successful in her early career, with work shown in prominent exhibitions and acquired by museums and private collectors. While she fell into relative obscurity in her later years, ”several recent exhibitions have helped to bring awareness of Morgan’s art and accomplishments to a new generation of museum visitors,” said Tanya Pohrt, the Museum’s curator. Pohrt noted that this exhibition aims to share Morgan’s work and legacy with new audiences. ”Combining observation and imagination, Morgan created dynamic and resonant works of art that were uniquely her own.”
A free virtual lecture, “Exploring Norma Morgan with Dr. Amalia Amaki” will be held on February 15 at 6 p.m., led by distinguished artist, curator, and art historian Dr. Amalia Amaki. Dr. Amaki’s essay, “Norma Morgan’s Sanctuary” was featured in the catalogue of the exhibition Norma Morgan: Enchanted Worlds, held at the Academy Art Museum, Maryland in 2021.
Join Dr. Bruce Weber, Independent Art Historian and Dr. Tanya Pohrt, Lyman Allyn curator, for an in-person gallery talk on Saturday, March 24 from 2 – 4 p.m. Dr. Weber contributed an essay to this exhibition, and he curated the 2023 exhibition Norma Morgan: In the Lands of the Moors and Catskills at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum. Members are $10 and non-members are $15; call 860.443.2545 to RSVP.
Lyman Allyn Art Museum
The Lyman Allyn Art Museum welcomes visitors from New London, southeastern Connecticut and all over the world. Established in 1926 with a gift from Harriet Allyn in memory of her seafaring father, the Museum opened the doors of its beautiful neoclassical building surrounded by 12 acres of green space in 1932. Today it presents several changing exhibitions each year and houses a fascinating collection of over 18,000 objects from ancient times to the present, including art from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, with particularly strong collections of American paintings, decorative arts and Victorian toys and doll houses.
