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Title:	Their Kindred Earth: Photographs by William Earle Williams
Date:	2/22/2025 - 1/22/2026
Address:	Florence Griswold Museum, 96 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, CT 06371
Location:	Old Lyme, CT
Hours:	10:00am - 4:00pm
Cost/Cover:	free - $18
Web Page:	https://florencegriswoldmuseum.org/exhibitions/#current
Contact Info:	860-434-5542

Details:

Land holds history. Some histories are better known than others, preserved by those who valued particular stories and wanted them remembered. What do we know about the land we live on? Who preceded us and what transpired? History books leave holes and silences along with assumptions that have been passed down for generations. This exhibition aims to fill some of the absences by sharing lesser-known stories about Connecticut and its connections to other regions that played a role in bringing people of color to the shores of the future United States. Art has the power to help us see, and to encourage us to imagine the presence of those who had no agency or opportunity to record their own histories. Over the past forty years artist William Earle Williams (born 1950) has made sites of African American history more visible through his exquisite photographs. Mentored in the 1970s by the famed photographer Walker Evans, who had a home in Lyme, Williams attended the Yale School of Art at Evans’s suggestion. From that Connecticut inception, Williams embarked on a decades-long journey to identify and photograph places across the country that hold histories of the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, and emancipation.