Florence Griswold Museum celebrates its Artists’ Trail

‘Oh, I understand that this is the backdrop for all of this creation.’ Instead, you get to experience this site as a resident, as an artist would, and we are encouraging that for the first time,” said Beaulieu, while also explaining that such an experience is rarely found in the museum world.

Visitors walking through the trail can also learn about the ecology of the property, its migratory bird habitats and native plants, as well as historically significant areas that former longtime museum director Jeffrey Andersen had said can be overlooked.

Dedicated to Robert F. Schumann, a former trustee and patron of the museum for nearly two decades, plans for the trail began in 2017 after the Robert F. Schumann Foundation awarded the museum a $1 million grant to in part have Stephen Stimson Associates Landscape Architects of Cambridge, Mass., design a master landscape plan.

The museum applied for the grant after it acquired the last remaining piece of the 12 acres that made up the original Florence Griswold property in 2016, said Andersen in an interview with The Day about the project in 2017.

After Griswold died in 1937, the property was divided, redistributed and redeveloped, losing many of the ecological aspects that once constituted much of the land, Andersen said.

“Finally obtaining this last piece was really the catalyst to set this landscape idea into motion,” Andersen said.

Andersen also explained then that the museum’s property was “a land of edges” and encapsulated much more than its gallery and museum spaces.

“From its historic hedgerows lining the property borders to its surrounding forest patches and marshland gardens, the parts that often inspired the artists, were set along the edges of the property,” Andersen had said. “It’s these areas that were a part of their experience but have largely been lost today. Our vision is to highlight the edges of the property and to reincorporate all of that back in to what exists now.”