Florence Griswold Museum (14 miles from campus)
During the early years of the 20th century, the Lyme Art Colony, centered in Miss Florence Griswold’s boardinghouse, became America’s most famous summer art colony. Today this museum of art and history tells the story of how Connecticut played a pivotal role in fostering an authentic American art. As a partner institution with Connecticut College's Museum Studies Certificate Program, art history majors regularly work as interns and docents at the Florence Griswold Museum.
Slater Memorial Museum (16 miles from campus)
Located on the campus of Norwich Free Academy, the Slater Memorial Museum displays one of America's most important remaining collections of 19th-century plaster casts of classical and Renaissance sculpture. Students in "Introduction to Museum Studies" visit the Slater Memorial Museum to experience firsthand a unique moment in museum history preserved to this day.
Mashantucket Pequot Museum (22 miles from campus)
The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is the world’s largest Native American Museum dedicated to the history and culture of the Pequots, the histories and cultures of other tribes from the United States and Canada, and the natural history of New England and North America.
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (50 miles from campus)
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, the oldest public art museum in the United States, was founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth, one of the first important American patrons of the arts. Its collections of nearly 50,000 works of art span 5,000 years and feature the Morgan collection of Greek and Roman antiquities and European decorative arts; world-renowned baroque and surrealist paintings; an unsurpassed collection of Hudson River School landscapes; European and American Impressionist paintings; modernist masterpieces; the Serge Lifar collecton of Ballets Russes drawings and costumes; the George A. Gay collection of prints; the Wallace Nutting collection of American colonial furniture and decorative arts; the Samuel Colt firearms collection; costumes and textiles; African American art and artifacts; and contemporary art.
New Britain Museum of American Art (53 miles from campus)
The New Britain Museum of American Art's founding in 1903 entitles the institution to be designated the first museum of strictly American art in the country. The museum has particular strengths in colonial portraiture, the Hudson River School, American Impressionism, and the Ash Can School.
Rhode Island School of Design Museum (56 miles from campus)
Southeastern New England's only comprehensive art museum, the RISD Museum was established in 1877. The permanent collection of more than 91,000 objects includes paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, costume, furniture, and other works of art from every part of the world—including objects from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and art of all periods from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, up to the latest in contemporary art.
Yale University Art Gallery (57 miles from campus)
Yale University Art Gallery is the oldest college art museum in America. The Gallery’s encyclopedic holdings, 200,000 objects, range from ancient times to the present day and represent civilizations from around the globe. In December 2012, the Yale University Art Gallery celebrated the grand opening of the renovated and expanded museum.