“Animated Interiors: Frederic Church’s Experiments with Space and Light” with Julia B. Rosenbaum

November 4, 2021

As a renowned landscape painter, Frederic Church had long grappled with how to capture the vibrantly animated world around him. His paintings and drawings attest to both the heights he achieved in these efforts as well as their vexing limits. With his foray into house building in the early 1870s, Church moved into an immersive, three-dimensional format for his art, manipulating space and daylight as artistic materials. During this webinar, Julia B. Rosenbaum (Bard College) considers the first-floor interiors of his home at Olana not only as a deliberate composition—of a piece with his two-dimensional oeuvre—but as an aesthetic culmination of his enduring engagement with issues of visual perception and bodily proprioception.

Julia B. Rosenbaum focuses on nineteenth and early twentieth-century American visual material. Author of Visions of Belonging, a professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College and has served as consulting Director of Research and Publications at The Olana Partnership.

photo credit: Peter Aaron/OTTO