Olana Perspectives: After Icebergs at Cooper Hewitt

May 27, 2020

Caitlin Condell is the associate curator and head of the Department of Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum where she oversees a collection of nearly 147,000 works on paper dating from the fourteenth century to the present. She has organized and contributed to numerous exhibitions and publications, including After Icebergs (2019–20), Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial(2019–20), Fragile Beasts (2016–17), Making Design (2014–15), and How Posters Work (2015), at Cooper Hewitt, and Making Room: The Space between Two and Three Dimensions (2012–13), at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). Her publication E. McKnight Kauffer: The Artist in Advertising will be published by Rizzoli Electa in October, and the related exhibition Underground Modernist: E. McKnight Kauffer will open at Cooper Hewitt in December 2020.

In the summer of 1859, Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900)—the most celebrated American landscape painter of his time—journeyed to Newfoundland and Labrador to study and sketch icebergs. Arctic exploration had captured the imagination of the public in the preceding decades, and Church was lured to the North Atlantic by accounts of a surreal polar landscape. These studies, drawn from Cooper Hewitt’s collection of over 2,000 drawings by Church, offer us a moment to reflect with reverence on the fragility of our natural world. One hundred and sixty years later, Church’s studies are at once seductive and frighteningly poignant. Join curator Caitlin Condell as she gives a virtual tour of the exhibition After Icebergs at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and tells the story of how Church’s sketches came to Cooper Hewitt.