Capturing the Cosmos: Frederic Church painting Humboldt’s Vision of Nature Evelyn and Maurice Sharp Gallery | May 15 – October 30, 2016 Capturing the Cosmos, the 2016 exhibition in the Sharp Family Gallery, explored the influence of the great German Naturalist Alexander von Humboldt on Frederic Church. Acclaimed and revered during his own lifetime, Humboldt is currently enjoying a renaissance due to the recent award-winning bio The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf. Humboldt’s writings inspired Church’s South American adventures and the resulting masterpieces that made him internationally famous, and informed Church’s later trips to Germany’s Bavarian Lakes and Mexico. Sketches, diaries …Read More

On the Road

The Rockies & the Alps Bierstadt, Calame, and the Romance of the Mountains The Newark Museum | March 24 – August 19, 2018

The Rockies and the Alps places Newark’s renowned collection of 19th-century landscape painting in dialogue with European alpine painting of the same period. This visually stunning exhibition will explore mountain landscape art in the United States and Europe through paintings, photographs, prints, sketch books, travel literature, and scientific specimens. Read more.

Objects:

Frederic Edwin Church, Rainbow Near Berchtesgaden, Germany, July-August 1868, Oil on paper mounted to canvas, 13 ¼ x 20 1/8 inches. OL.1980.1883.
Frederic Edwin …Read More

On the Road

Pissarro: A Meeting on St. Thomas Ordrupgaard Museum, Denmark | March 10 – July 2, 2017

Is there a link between Danish Golden Age painting and French Impressionism? On the occasion of the centenary of the sale of the Danish West Indies, Ordrupgaard is highlighting the encounter between the Danish Golden Age painter Fritz Melbye and the later ‘father’ of French Impressionism, Camille Pissarro, on the island of St. Thomas. The exhibition Pissarro. A Meeting on St. Thomas presents new historical material that will radically challenge most people’s ideas of the birth of Impressionism. For more information …Read More

Mystery Box: Student Artists at Work Coachman’s House Gallery | June 4 – July 31, 2016

The Coachman’s House Gallery was transformed into an experimental work space for Bard College undergraduate and MFA students, Scott van der Veen and Lily Prince, who were selected to experiment with research-based art-making practices at Olana. These students were available for questions and conversations throughout the summer weekends and visitors watched their artwork develop over time.

Follies, Function & Form: Imagining Olana’s Summer House The Center for Architecture – New York City / Coachman’s House Gallery

Frederic Joseph Church, Plan of Olana, September 1886, watercolor on paper, OL. 1984.39. Collection Olana State Historic Site, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation

January 30-April 22, 2017
August 14-November 13, 2016

The historic 1886 Plan of Olana is largely accurate, yet it contains one mystery: a structure labeled “Summer House”.  Summer houses were common in early American gardens and public landscapes, yet there is no documentary evidence about the style or form of this structure at Olana. …Read More

On the Road Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World Brooklyn Museum of Art | October 2, 2015 – January 3, 2016

Olana has loaned two works from its collection to Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art October 2, 2015–January 3, 2016. This exhibition explores the painter Francisco Oller, who contributed greatly to the development of modern art in both Europe and the Caribbean and revolutionized the school of painting in his native Puerto Rico. Olana has loaned Entrance to the City of St. Domingo, …Read More

Sharp Family Gallery 2015 Evelyn and Maurice Sharp Gallery | May 1 – November 1, 2015

This season the Sharp Family Gallery features a range of the artwork and objects transferred from the first floor of the main house to accommodate the installation of Olana’s 2015 exhibition River Crossings: Contemporary Art Comes Home, guest curated by Stephen Hannock and Jason Rosenfeld. These highlights from collections deinstalled for River Crossings will be on display in the Sharp Gallery from May 3 –November 1, 2015.

The gallery provides visitors with the opportunity to examine closely a selection of paintings, sketches, and decorative arts …Read More

River Crossings: Contemporary Art Comes Home Thomas Cole National Historic Site and Olana State Historic Site | May 3 – November 1, 2015

We are excited to announce our 2015 exhibition, River Crossings: Contemporary Art Comes Home, presented in partnership with the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, featuring contemporary art installed directly into the historic spaces and landscapes of the two historic sites. The exhibition is curated by the artist Stephen Hannock and the art historian Jason Rosenfeld, PhD. Artists in the exhibition include Chuck Close, Gregory Crewdson, Lynn Davis, Don Gummer, Jerry Gretzinger, Valerie Hegarty, Angie Keefer, Stephen Hannock, …Read More

On the Road Connecting the World: The Panama Canal at 100 The Mint Museum | November 1, 2014 – February 1, 2015

Connecting the World: The Panama Canal at 100 opens in fall 2014, the centennial of the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, and brings together selected examples of the work of the three most important American artists to draw and paint the construction of the canal, printmaker Joseph Pennell and painters Alson Skinner Clark and Jonas Lie, for the first time. Providing a rich context for these works is a handful of paintings by nineteenth-century American artists …Read More

Mystery Box: Student Artists At Work Coachman’s House Gallery | June – November 2015

Throughout the 2015 summer and fall season, The Olana Partnership gave nine Bard College students the opportunity to participate in a “research-based” artist residency program. On their first day they were given a box of unknown objects and materials that had been assembled by The Olana Partnership staff; all of these poems, photographs, and historic documents surfaced from Olana’s collections and circled around the theme “Trees, Art, and Tourism”. Throughout …Read More