The work of Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), renowned American landscape painter, was indelibly shaped by global travel. Church’s art was defined by place: early trips took him to South America, across the northeastern United States, and to the Arctic; later he visited the Caribbean, Europe, and the Middle East; in his final decades, he spent long sojourns in Mexico. The designed landscapes, extensive collections, and striking architecture of his home, Olana reflect the many worlds through which he traveled.
Co-curated by Elizabeth Kornhauser, Tim Barringer, and Jennifer Raab, Frederic Church: Global Artist will unite a group intimate drawings and oil sketches executed by Church on-site during an extensive lifetime of travel, illuminating his encounters with new environments and cultures, presented alongside examples of the large, extravagantly detailed paintings produced for public exhibition, which made the artist internationally famous.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a groundbreaking new publication from Yale University Press in association with The Olana Partnership, also titled Frederic Church: Global Artist, co-edited by Barringer, Kornhauser, and Raab. This lavishly illustrated volume features original essays by scholars from across the humanities that reveal Church as an artist enmeshed in the global economic and imperial ventures of the nineteenth century. Church’s works engage with questions of industrialization and environmental destruction, the rise and fall of empires, the construction of national identity, and the cataclysmic effects of slavery and civil war. Frederic Church: Global Artist examines the artist in his time and demonstrates his continuing relevance in our own.

Frederic Church: Global Artist is curated by Elizabeth Kornhauser, Curator Emerita, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Senior Curator and Chair, The Frederic Church Bicentennial Committee, The Olana Partnership; Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor in the History of Art, Yale University; and Jennifer Raab, Professor in the History of Art, Yale University.

The exhibition will be presented in the Sharp Family Gallery at Olana State Historic Site from May 17-October 25, 2026.

Generous support for this exhibition and the accompanying publication has been provided by:

Donors to The Olana Partnership’s Frederic Church 200 Fund, with special appreciation to members of the Frederic Church 200 Committee

The exhibition Frederic Church: Global Artist is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

The Olana Partnership is the 501(c)(3) not-for-profit cooperative partner of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation at Olana State Historic Site.