OLD LYME, CONN.- The FloGris Museum in Old Lyme, CT, presents its first solo exhibition by a contemporary Black artist, Their Kindred Earth: Photographs by William Earle Williams, February 22 through June 22, 2025. The exhibition of newly commissioned photographs makes visible little-known sites across Old Lyme (as well as the state and nation) significant to enslavement, emancipation, and African Americans’ contributions to Connecticut history and culture. The title Their Kindred Earth is drawn from the poem “An Appeal to Women” by Black abolitionist Sarah Louise Forten Puvis (1814-1883) in which she calls for racial equality by understanding that all people, regardless of their skin color, return to the earth after death. Williams’s 120 poignant images acknowledge and honor the lives of the Black and Indigenous people who contributed in essential and often unrecognized ways to Connecticut’s society, culture, and economy. An array of educational programs helps visitors unpack these lesser–known Connecticut stories and grapple with their ramifications.
A Distinguished Chair Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Fine Arts, and Curator of Photography at Haverford College (PA), Williams (b. 1950) first traveled to the Museum in 2011 to visit the exhibition, The Exacting Eye of Walker Evans. Evans, the famed modernist photographer who had a home in Lyme, became a mentor to Williams in the 1970s and advised him to pursue graduate study at Yale, where he received his MFA from Yale School of Art in 1978. In 2021 Williams reconnected with the Museum through his interest in Witness Stones Old Lyme, a local initiative that documents and shares research about histories of local enslavement via a website and physical “stones.” These small brass markers denote where enslaved people lived and worked in the Lyme area, including three on the Museum’s front lawn, commemorating those who labored in a house that once stood where the Griswold House is now located. Inspired by the opportunity to deepen understanding about sites of enslavement and explore untold stories of the Black Americans who lived, labored, and traveled through Old Lyme on their route to freedom, the Museum’s Curator of Exhibitions Jennifer “Jenny” Stettler Parsons, Ph.D. invited Williams to return as Artist-in-Residence to revisit his research and create new photographs that would bring visibility to these Connecticut histories.
Parsons and Williams worked closely with historian Carolyn Wakeman, Ph.D., who spearheads the Witness Stones Old Lyme project. The three collaborated with members of the community to identify local sites of African American history. During 2023-24 Williams captured for the project over 2,000 images in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey that relate local sites to other regional locations important in African American history.
The exhibition opens with a gallery featuring Williams’s photographs of Old Lyme. Here visitors discover that familiar houses, cemeteries, and landscapes throughout the region hold hidden histories as places where enslaved people once lived, worked, sought escape, or were buried. At the beginning of the American Revolution, there were more enslaved people in Connecticut than in any other New England colony. An introductory section called “Connecticut Waterways & the West Indies Trade” contextualizes the region’s role in supporting the system of enslaved labor that expanded profits to Caribbean sugar plantations. Photographs Williams made of the Connecticut River and its shoreline encourage viewers to visualize the historic commerce along the waterway. In Old Lyme Marina, Old Lyme, Connecticut (2023), Williams’s dramatic view of contemporary yachts recalls earlier sailing vessels on the river that exported products like timber and salted shad and imported sugar and molasses. Another section entitled “Enslavement on Lyme Street” traces the photographer’s walks down the town’s main thoroughfare. He paused to make portraits of the four houses where Arabella, Jenny, Prince, Nancy, and others were enslaved by four generations of the Noyes family, sites now marked by Witness Stones.
The second gallery broadens the narrative through Williams’s photographs of subjects related to Black history in greater Connecticut and the nation. A section called “The Trade” offers views of the nearby port towns where African-descended people were disembarked and sold, including Perth Amboy and Jersey City (NJ); Battery Park City and Wall Street (NYC); New Haven, Middletown, New London (CT), and Bristol (RI). “Freedom’s Path” highlights historic locations in Connecticut linked to abolitionists David Ruggles, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Prudence Crandall. In Stairwell at Prudence Crandall’s School, Canterbury, Connecticut (2023), Williams’s interior of the schoolhouse encourages viewers to remember the bravery of Crandall and her students who raced down the staircase to flee threatened violence from those opposed to educating “young misses of color.”
Williams’s photographs harness the power of site-specificity to bring compassion, empathy, and immediacy to people and histories that are otherwise invisible, filed away in scattered archives, awaiting discovery. A final section of Their Kindred Earth titled “North & South: A Life’s Work, A National Journey” showcases Williams’s exploration of Black history throughout his distinguished photographic career. In 1986 he made the picture Abraham Brian Barn, Gettysburg National Military Park, Gettysburg, PA, which serves as an entry point for learning about the life of Abraham Brian, who escaped slavery and purchased a farm in 1857 that he used as a station on the Underground Railroad. Brian was a successful farmer until the battle of Gettysburg destroyed his crops. Bullet holes from the battle are visible in the barn’s façade. The site is a short walk from a marker locating the podium where Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address. The historical insights conveyed through Williams’s photographs prompt audiences to consider how African American history is remembered, to ponder details that have been lost, and to recognize how much still remains to be uncovered.
“We could not have found a better partner for this project,” states Executive Director Joshua Campbell Torrance. “It is our hope that visitors will be moved by Williams’s stirring images and commit to further reflection on the exhibition’s themes.”
