Looking at Frederic Church, 1975-2020

October 14, 2020 One of our country’s most prominent curator-scholars shares the unique perspective of his decades-long engagement with Frederic Church and Olana. This personal reflection looks back on how he came to know Church, to study him and his work seriously in graduate school, to work as a curator of his work in groundbreaking exhibitions and publications, and brings the story down to the present day with his bird’s-eye view of the recent fate of Church’s work, including rediscoveries, new research, and the art market. Watch

Partners in Design: Frederic Church, Calvert Vaux, and the making of Olana’s Main House

September 30, 2020

Frederic Church, America’s first international art star, returned from his travels through the Near East in 1869 filled with inspiration for the great house that he planned to build on his property near Hudson, New York. He turned to Calvert Vaux, an architect well known for his successful collaborations with landscape designers, particularly Church’s friend Frederick Law Olmsted. Dr. Sean Sawyer, the Washburn and Susan Oberwager President of The Olana Partnership, will explore the intensely collaborative design partnership that produced Olana’s Main House.

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Sightlines on the Hudson by Mary Roberts

September 9, 2020 Mary Roberts is the John Schaeffer Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney. She is a specialist in nineteenth-century European Orientalist and late Ottoman art, with particular expertise in the history of artistic exchanges and the culture of travel. In 2016 she was awarded the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand’s Book Prize for Istanbul Exchanges. Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (University of California Press, 2015). Her first book, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, was published by Duke University …Read More

Persia on the Hudson: Ali Muhammad Isfahani and Ceramic Production in Nineteenth-century Iran

July 22, 2020

Farshid Emami is an assistant professor in the department of art history at Rice University. He is a historian of Islamic art and architecture with a focus on the early modern period and particularly Safavid Iran. He completed his Ph.D. in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in 2017. He is currently completing a book manuscript that offers a new narrative of architecture and urbanism in seventeenth-century Isfahan, the Safavid capital, through the analytical lens of urban experience. Drawing on unstudied primary …Read More

Adding India: Lockwood de Forest’s Contribution to Olana’s Interiors

July 8, 2020

Sarah Coffin is an independent decorative arts and design consultant, curator, and lecturer, who is a member of Olana’s National Advisory Committee, Most recently for over 14 years, she was Senior Curator and Head of the Product Design and Decorative Arts Department at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum from which she retired in 2018. While there she curated blockbuster exhibitions on the Jazz Age, Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry, Rococo design from 1730-2008 and Feeding Desire on Dining Design from 1500-2005. In addition she oversaw the creation of the …Read More

Frederic Church’s Middle Eastern Costume Collection: Its Inspiration and Impact

June 24, 2020

Hanan Munayyer is President of the Palestinian Heritage Foundation and a scholar and curator specializing in Palestinian and other Arab traditional dress. Her many exhibition credits include an important contribution as an advisor and essayist for Olana’s 2018 exhibition Costume and Custom: Middle Eastern Threads at Olana, which was guest curated by textile historian Lynne Z. Bassett. She has lectured widely for universities and museums and she co-produced and wrote the script of the 1990 documentary Palestinian Costumes and Embroidery: A Precious Legacy. Since 2009, Ms. Munayyer has …Read More

Unplanned Views: The Geological History of Olana

June 10, 2020 Robert and Johanna Titus are retired professors of geology and biology. As popular science writers, they have authored four books and a thousand articles about the geology of the Hudson Valley. For years they have been studying how Ice Age glaciers sculpted the landscapes painted by members of the Hudson River School of Art. They have developed a theory that ice age activities had a lot to do with the development of what has been called the “sublime” by art historians and believe that an understanding of ice age history is …Read More

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 …Read More

Olana Perspectives:”Only the Roar Left Out”: Frederic Church and Niagara Falls

May 20, 2020

Sarah Cash is Associate Curator of American and British Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Previously she served as curator of American art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, director of the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, and Assistant Curator at the Amon Carter Museum. She has also held positions at Yale University Art Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, in addition to previous positions at the National Gallery of Art.

This lecture presents aspects of Cash’s ongoing research into Frederic Church’s …Read More

Olana Perspectives: Frederic Church and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

May 13, 2020

Dr. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser is the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (appointed in 2010) where she served as co-curator for the Met’s major exhibition: Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, in 2018, and which traveled to the National Gallery, London.

This talk focuses on the extraordinary role played by Frederic Church (1826-1900) as a founding trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Museum is celebrating the artist’s legacy this year as part of the larger program for its …Read More