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10/17/2019 12:01 AMNothing More American: Immigration, Sanctuary, and Community, an Exhibition by Matthew Leifheit, will be on view through May 24, 2020 at the Florence Griswold Museum, 96 Lyme Street, Old Lyme.
The exhibition features images of the civic ideal as conceived by 19th- and 20th-century artists such as Childe Hassam and Everett Warner, along with contemporary photography by Leifheit.
Once a symbol of New England colonists’ pious ambition to establish a new society, the meetinghouse merged religion, government, and community into a powerful civic ideal that prevailed for two centuries.
This exhibit brings together depictions of Old Lyme’s renowned First Congregational Church in a way that contemplate the evolving symbolism of the meetinghouse.
The title, Nothing More American, comes from artist Lorado Taft’s description of Hassam’s painting Church at Old Lyme as “nothing more American on all the continent,” a sentiment that resonates with the historic image of the church and immigration’s relationship to the American dream. The exhibition and related programming explore the intersection between the fraught topic of immigration and the history of this local landmark as both an iconic artistic subject and a place of sanctuary.
Sanctuary with a Sense of History
In the summer of 2018, Leifheit, a Brooklyn-based photographer, provided photography for an article in The New Yorker about a Pakistani family that sought refuge from deportation between May and October 2018 in the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme. Leifheit’s photos evoke what it was like for the family during their months inside the church, creating images of their living spaces, the art they made while there, and the people from the congregation who helped them.
Leifheit’s photos of the church’s neoclassical spaces and architectural details encourage viewers to approach it with reverence as a sanctuary, as well as with a sense of history. The artist then expanded his portrait series to include depictions of families aided by the Old Lyme Refugee Resettlement Committee, a coalition of three religious congregations in town—the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, Christ the King Church, and St. Ann’s Episcopal Church. It assists people who have fled war, persecution, or natural disasters in places such as Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, or Puerto Rico, and who are now building new lives or pursuing paths to citizenship with support from the local church community. Leifheit’s images relate people and architecture, pairing their stories to help us understand larger issues by considering them on a human scale.
Notions of American Identity
Early 20th-century works in the exhibition by Hassam, as well as Warner, Charles Ebert, and Bertha Dougherty, depict the church’s venerable architectural elements, such as its white clapboards and towering steeple, which celebrate New England heritage, a key impulse during the era’s Colonial Revival movement. For Hassam, presenting the meetinghouse in this way promoted his pride in his Anglo-Saxon ancestry during an era in which America was experiencing significant immigration from eastern and southern Europe. An important painting on loan from Art Bridges, Italian Day, May 1918, amplifies Hassam’s notion of American identity. He depicts the flag-decked streets of New York City during World War I to declare his patriotism and nationalism. In the early 20th century, the attitude Hassam held as an American whose family could claim generations of ancestors in this country often corresponded with resistance to growing immigration by non-Anglo-Saxon populations, whose potential for assimilation was questioned.
The dialogue between the past and present invocations of Old Lyme’s First Congregational Church sheds light on a topic of immediate relevance—immigration—that has dominated recent headlines.
More information is available at FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org.