EXHIBITIONS

June 17 – November 25, 2018

The 2018 exhibition will highlight the first time that the historic costumes Church collected on his 1867-68 journey to Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem, Petra and other Middle Eastern cities will be seen by the public. They will be displayed within the historic rooms of Olana’s main house, whose design was inspired by Churches’ Middle Eastern travels, and Olana’s Sharp Family Gallery will present new research on the collection and its relationship to Church’s work and that of his contemporaries, including Church’s friend and guest at Olana, Mark Twain.

The exhibition will reunite Church’s historic costume collection with both Church’s artwork that it helped to inspire and inform and the rich interiors of his home that he filled with objects and decorative details inspired by his Middle Eastern travels. In one extraordinary case these are one and the same. Within Isabel Church’s Sitting Room hangs Church’s master work “El Khasné, Petra” (1874), whose foreground features figures clothed in the costume pieces Church brought back to his studio and which inspired the decoration of the room, especially the decorative painted pseudo-Arabic inscriptions that run throughout the space.

The wide array of historic costumes, often intricately embroidered, reflects the extraordinary craft and creativity of the Middle Eastern people who created it and speaks as well to the evolution of ideas of gender and cultural identity in the Middle East and beyond. A publication developed in conjunction with this exhibition will include essays by costume historian Lynne Bassett and Palestinian costume expert Hanan Karaman Munayyer on the people who originally wore the clothing collected by Church and on the artist’s use of the historic costume in his home and art.

For information about house and landscape tours, click here.

Sponsorship Information

This installation is organized by The Olana Partnership and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

This exhibition was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and the following supporters:

Additional support was provided by donors to the Novak-Ferber Exhibitions Fund.