FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 6, 2020
Lyman Allyn Art Museum
Press Contact: Rebecca Dawson, Director of Communications
860.443.2545 x2112 / [email protected]
LYMAN ALLYN ART MUSEUM INSTALLS PAINTING TO RAISE VOTER AWARENESS
New London – As the 2020 general election approaches, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum has installed a painting by artist Kyra Markham to help raise awareness on the importance of voting. The oil on canvas, titled At the Voting Booth, will be on view in the lobby through November 7, 2020.
The installation is part of the Create the Vote CT program, a nonpartisan public education campaign to raise awareness and support for the arts among voters and candidates running for public office.
In this 1958 painting, social realist artist Kyra Markham depicts the act of voting. A man considers the candidates, his pencil raised in thought, while a woman bends to mark her ballot. The space is theatrically lit, with shadows giving way to light beyond the partition, drawing our gaze toward the bright future of democracy.
A painter, printmaker, and actress, Chicago native Kyra Markham studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League of New York. She produced lithographs and paintings in a social realist vein, rendering street scenes, entertainers, and the theater. Markham worked for the Graphic Arts division of the Federal Arts Project in the late 1930s and produced anti-Nazi and patriotic art during World War II. Markham moved to Vermont in 1946, where she exhibited and produced commercial art and book illustrations.
For more information, please contact Rebecca Dawson by email at [email protected].
About Create the Vote CT
Create the Vote CT is a nonpartisan public education campaign to raise awareness and support for the arts among voters and candidates running for public office. The Connecticut Arts Alliance launched the first Create the Vote CT during the gubernatorial election in 2018 and inspired focus on the arts during Governor Lamont’s transition and helped stabilize statewide public funding for the first time since the Great Recession. The initiative was originally conceived and developed at MASSCreative, a state arts advocacy organization in Massachusetts.
About the Lyman Allyn Art Museum
The Lyman Allyn Art Museum welcomes visitors from New London, southeastern Connecticut and all over the world. Established in 1926 by a gift from Harriet Allyn in memory of her seafaring father, the Museum opened the doors of its beautiful neo-classical building surrounded by 12 acres of green space in 1932. Today it presents a number of changing exhibitions each year and houses a fascinating collection of over 17,000 objects from ancient times to the present; artworks from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, with particularly strong collections of American paintings, decorative arts and Victorian toys and doll houses.
The museum is located at 625 Williams Street, New London, Connecticut, exit 83 off I-95. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm, Sundays 1:00 – 5:00 pm; closed Mondays and major holidays. For more information call 860.443.2545, ext. 2129 or visit us on Facebook or the web at: www.lymanallyn.org.