A pop-up Exhibition at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum
January 25 – February 26, 2023

Over a long and remarkable career as a best-selling author and international interior designer, Alexandra Stoddard has focused on ways to incorporate beauty and color into our daily rituals to bring us happiness. A resident of Stonington, Connecticut, Stoddard lives as she writes, surrounded by art and everyday objects that instill joy. This pop-up exhibition features select art and objects from Stoddard’s personal collection, including paintings, works on paper, ceramics, quilts, scarves, and vintage textiles. Stoddard holds a sizable collection of paintings by Roger Mühl (French, 1929-2008), including several featured here. Works of art by Joan Brady, Lord Alistair Gordon, and Lady Anne Gordon will also be on view, in addition to items such as postcards, ribbons, and stationery, offering a reminder of how simple colorful objects can uplift our lives and bring joy to others.

Stoddard studied interior design in New York and traveled around the world before she began her career in interior design in 1961. In her work, she created a unique approach to decorating, dealing with space primarily from the point of view of color. Stoddard’s design work led her to write, and she is considered one of the pioneers of the Happiness Movement. She has written 28 books about living well, including Living a Beautiful Life, Alexandra Stoddard’s Book of Color, Choosing Happiness, The Decoration of Houses, You Are Your Choices, Time Alive, The Shared Wisdom of Mothers and Daughters and Living in Love. Her books and philosophies earned her widespread media attention, including features in magazines, newspapers, and TV shows such as the Today Show, Good Morning America, and Oprah. Stoddard hosted the HGTV program Homes Across America, and she wrote a monthly column Living Beautifully for McCall’s Magazine for six years. Alexandra has hosted Happiness Retreats across the country and in her hometown of Stonington. She is the mother of Alexandra and Brooke and has four grandchildren.

Lecture

December 3, 2022 – January 29, 2023

Pamela Zagarenski, Day and Night, acrylic gold leaf, 55 x 22 inches.

This winter, the Lyman Allyn presents new works by Pamela Zagarenski, artist, writer and Caldecott Honor Award-winning illustrator of books including Sleep Like a Tiger, Aesop’s Fables and Red Sings from Tree Tops. With paintings that draw on sacred geometry and healing traditions from around the world, The Circle Game invites visitors young and old to enter into paintings brimming with animals, mystical figures and faraway places. Evoking the wonder of both the extraordinary and the mundane, this exhibition celebrates the dualities of life—light and dark, love and hate, good and bad—in a spirit of magical exploration. [Read more…]

September 14  – 28, 2022

In 2002 I chanced on this moment in time which for me represented culture changing in front of my eyes, received art history becoming fluid, its meaning and impact no longer static, known art loosened from its foundations, no longer items permanently held in a museum collection.

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