The Lyman Allyn Art Museum announces the opening of A Colorful Dream, Photography by Adrien Broom, on view from November 19, 2016 through January 8, 2017. This exhibition, an exhilarating holiday season experience for the whole family, features the bold and colorful work of local artist, Adrien Broom.

A Colorful Dream is the latest exhibition in the Lyman Allyn’s Near :: New contemporary series. This family-friendly, interactive exhibition highlights the work of contemporary fine art and commercial photographer, Adrien Broom.

The culmination of a three-year studio project, A Colorful Dream features a colorful and evocative three-dimensional installation and large-scale photographs detailing a young girl’s journey as she rediscovers all the colors of the rainbow. While working in her studio, Broom designed and constructed individual sets composed of everything that embodies a particular color; a world of white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and rainbow. She then photographed a young girl finding and traveling through each monochromatic world, beginning in her all-white bedroom, rediscovering the simple joys of color.

Broom’s project began with a dream about color, imagining what it would be like to awaken in a world without color and then have each color of the rainbow reappear in turn. Adrien and her assistants Kristen Meyer and Tony Palmieri painstakingly traced this narrative of color discovery, constructing sets filled with objects in a particular color and photographing a young girl’s experiences within these colorful worlds. This journey concluded with a rainbow-hued space where objects of multiple color converged, offering dazzling chromatic range and variety. This magical vision is recreated in the Glassenberg Gallery at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, where Museum visitors will be able to immerse themselves in Broom’s fantasy world through an interactive rainbow forest where they can take pictures of their own!

Interested in fairy-tale themes, Broom creates and documents lush dreamscapes— places that might only exist in fantasy. They are very real, however, constructed from actual objects in three-dimensional space. The magical forest and the photographs explore formal beauty and offer fictive worlds that engage color in visually striking and thought-provoking ways. Designed to evoke and capture a sense of childhood fantasy, they also challenge viewers to consider the meaning of color, vision, and the historic and cultural associations of different hues.

The public is encouraged to come take joy in A Colorful Dream and its accompanying programming. This exhibition will be sure to lend an unforgettable air of celebratory magic this Holiday season to New London, and beyond. The opening reception will be on November 18th from 5:00 – 7:00pm. Museum members are free and non-members are $10. Please RSVP to 860.443.2545 ext. 129.

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. 129 or visit us on Facebook or the web at: www.lymanallyn.org.