Memento Mori Mandalas and Birds in the Hudson Valley

June 8, 2021

Join artist Portia Munson and conservationist Kathryn Schneider as they discuss Munson’s artwork onsite at Olana, Memento Mori Mandalas. During this presentation, learn more about Munson’s work, which memorializes and honors creatures that have paid the price of humanity’s harsh impact on the land. Through conversation, this webinar will explore Memento Mori Mandalas’ timely ecological connections and the lives of regional bird species highlighted in Munson’s work. Evoking the transitory Buddhist spiritual practice of mandala making, Munson’s work reflects on the passing beauty of earthly things and the …Read More

Below the Surface: What Scientific Imaging Reveals about Church’s Artistic Process by Maura Lyons

May 18, 2021

While Frederic Church won acclaim during his lifetime for his skills as a painter, a focus solely on Church’s paintings ignores his technical experimentation in multiple media, including drawing and printmaking. In this virtual webinar, Maura Lyons (Drake University) will focus on two Civil War-era works, Our Banner in the Sky and Our Flag, to examine Church’s working process more closely. Lyons will highlight her research using scientific techniques to examine Our Flag while working at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). These …Read More

Capturing Nature in Science and Art, or, How to Make an Impossible Picture by Rachael DeLue

May 11, 2021

The nineteenth-century German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt characterized his life’s work as an endeavor “to represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces.” In this presentation, Rachael Z. DeLue, Christopher Binyon Sarofim ’86 Professor in American Art at Princeton University, discusses the challenges presented by such an ambitious undertaking. Consideration of the extraordinary images devised by Humboldt to represent the multifarious phenomena of the natural world sets the stage for an exploration of work by artists like …Read More

Frederic Church’s The Natural Bridge, Virginia: American History and Anxiety by Christopher Oliver

April 28, 2021 In 1851 Frederic Church travelled through Virginia in the company of his patron Cyrus Field with the goal of reaching and painting that state’s most famous landscape, the Natural Bridge. Formerly the property of Thomas Jefferson, the Natural Bridge was frequently rendered by the pencil and brush of nineteenth century artists, very few of whom could escape the outsized legacy of the former President in crafting a popular conception of the Natural Bridge. Christopher Oliver will consider Church’s painting of the following year, The …Read More

Fallen: In Conversation with Jean Shin

April 14, 2021

Join artist Jean Shin as she shares the ideas and ecological urgency behind her new artwork onsite at Olana, Fallen. During this presentation, learn more about Shin’s work and this project, which brings attention to the loss of this once-majestic hemlock on Olana’s main lawn. When the artist Frederic Church created Olana’s 250-acre naturalistic landscape, he planted thousands of native trees on a hillside that had been previously logged and deforested. In the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of hemlocks were cut down for the tanning industry, which used the tannin …Read More

Eliza Pratt Greatorex & Frederic Church: Art, Travel, Faith, Home by Katherine Manthorne

March 23, 2021

Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819-1897) and Frederic Church (1826-1900) were two near-contemporary visual artists of fierce ambition and enormous talent. They inhabited the same New York art world, traveled extensively in the service of their art, and earned critical acclaim across the United States and Europe. Putting their careers in dialogue, this presentation examines their artistic practices, globe-trotting itineraries and strategies for engaging with the public. Given that Church was a Connecticut Yankee with deep American roots while Greatorex (née Pratt) left her native Ireland …Read More

Into the Maelstrom: The Life and Career of Mary Edmonia Lewis by Kirsten Pai Buick

February 24, 2021

In the U.S., one of the earliest and most passionate discussions around the fine arts and their role in defining American identity and national aspirations took place over neoclassical sculpture. Issues of belonging and citizenship, gender, race, region, and class were negotiated through the medium of marble. In the 19th century, Mary Edmonia Lewis (1845-1907), the first woman of Ojibwe and African American descent to gain international acclaim as a sculptor, entered these conversations. In this presentation, Professor Kirsten Buick will explore …Read More

Sacred Geographies: Frederic Church, the Holy Land, and the Hudson Valley by Jennifer Raab

January 6, 2021

During this Olana Perspectives Webinar, Jennifer Raab, Associate Professor in the History of Art at Yale, will investigate how Frederic Church’s travels through the Middle East and his paintings of Jerusalem and Petra shaped his Hudson Valley home and masterpiece, Olana. Raab is the author of Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (2015), which considers a selection of Church’s major landscape paintings in light of scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century. Watch

Making it Last: The Art & Science of Preserving Olana’s Paper & Photographic Collections

November 18, 2020

Michele Phillips is the Paper Conservator at the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (NYSOPRHP), working at the centralized conservation labs at the Bureau of Historic Sites & Parks, Peebles Island Resources Center. Her treatment specialty ranges from prints, drawings & letters, to wallpaper & large maps. Michele is a Professional Associate of the American Institute for Conservation, a regular presenter at international museum conferences, and a grant reviewer for the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the …Read More

Mexican Rebozo Shawls at Olana & Beyond: From Uncertain Origins to Compromised Future

October 28, 2020

This talk by one of the world’s leading scholars and advocates of Mexico’s rich tradition of textile art will focus on a little known story in Olana’s diverse collections. Marta Turok takes as her focus Olana’s important holdings of uncannily well preserved “rebozos,” traditional shawls primarily used by indigenous women that were purchased by the Church family during their travels in Mexico. She will give a brief overview of the history of the Mexican rebozo and share the challenges facing the future of this …Read More