A lazy Sunday morning in late June, warm and muggy, was a good day for the Brandywine River Museum of Art to reopen to the general public after a three-month hiatus for some renovation. New restrooms, a redesigned gallery, a new sculpture out front, and a new exhibit featuring the works of Ralston Crawford is on display for the reopening.

The sculpture Boy with Hawk, which greeted visitors for years has been replaced with a pair of entwined peacocks entitled Tipping Point by Rikki Morely Saunders now rests on the grassy outdoor pedestal. But for the museum, it’s what’s inside that really counts.

For the more traditional Brandywine art fare, a wide-open second-floor gallery with an airy feel features the words of both N.C. and Jamie Wyeth, while the third floor displays the new exhibit, Ralston Crawford: Air & Space & War.

The Canadian-born Crawford grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., traveled the Great Lakes with his sea-captain father, and studied art in California before coming east and living and painting in Exton and Chadds Ford before WWII. He enlisted in the Army Air Force where he created maps and weather charts, creating a visual representation of weather patterns, which are the basis for the weather maps of today.

He also saw images of wreckage and destruction that influenced his abstract art. A case in point is “Bomber,” a painting based on a photograph he saw of a plane that had crashed into a home. After the war, he went to Bikini Atoll to witness nuclear bomb tests. He did several abstracts of what he witnessed there.

The exhibit, which runs through Sept. 19, was organized by the Vilcek Foundation in collaboration with the Brandywine and includes 80 works — drawing, photos, and paintings. The works form a narrative of his WWII involvement.

Emily Navratil, the curator for the Vilcek Foundation, said Crawford’s military experience and familiarity with military aircraft “forged the themes that he would explore for the rest of his artistic career.”