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.

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 Press in 2007. She has co-edited four other books and has been a Getty Scholar, CASVA Senior Fellow, YCBA Fellow and Clark-Oakley Fellow. Her next book is on artists as collectors of Islamic art.

“About an hour this side of Albany is the Center of the world – I own it.”

Frederic Church to Erastus Dow Palmer, July 7, 1869

What kind of world is it that Frederic Church was creating in his Persian-inspired home on the Hudson? This lecture proposes some answers to this question by analysing three of the interior sightlines within his home and considering the way each distinctively engages with visual cultures of the Near East. First, the sitting room: I tease out the significance of Church’s painting, El Khasné, Petra, in this space by studying his drawings made while travelling and the written account of that journey. Second, the court hall: paying particular attention to the optical effects Church was creating with his staircase, my study of the preparatory drawings for this part of the room reveals the diverse Islamic secular and religious visual sources he was translating into this focal point of his orientalist interior. Third, the fireplace sightline in one of the upstairs bedrooms: this brings into consideration an artist who was Church’s contemporary – the ceramicist Ali Mohammed Isfahani – whose work also circulated within global networks of patronage. Through this focus on some of Olana’s object worlds, its sightlines and architectural translations of eastern ornament, I explore the cultural politics of Church’s practice of worlding.

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 sources, the book takes the reader on journeys through Isfahan’s markets, gardens, and coffeehouses, analyzing how the city fostered new human experiences and became a setting for fashioning selves.

Besides his publications on Safavid art and architecture, Farshid Emami has written on a range of topics in art and architectural history, including lithographic printing in the nineteenth century and modernist architecture and urbanism in the Middle East. His articles have appeared in the Muqarnas, Metropolitan Museum Journal, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, South Asian Studies, and International Journal of Islamic Architecture.

Among the works kept at Olana are a group of ceramic tiles and objects attributed to Ali Muhammad Isfahani, a master of ceramic production active in Iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century during the late Qajar period (1789-1925). This presentation examines the imagery, iconography, and provenance of this corpus, particularly focusing on the figural tiles installed at two fireplaces at Olana. An examination of the context in which these tiles were created and transferred reveals that they do not merely reflect a traditional craft but were also products of the emerging tastes of the late nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America as well as in Qajar Iran.

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 Permanent Collections floor with five exhibitions opening simultaneously for the renovated museum re-opening in 2014. One of the exhibitions she co-curated then was Passion for the Exotic: Lockwood de Forest and Frederic Church, featuring the museum’s de Forest-designed Teak Room and works, primarily from the collection with loans from Olana.

Lockwood de Forest (1850-1932), a painter and interior designer started his artistic career painting with Frederic Church at Olana. Related by marriage to Church, de Forest stayed at Olana during the 1870s, where he studied books in Church’s library on middle eastern design by Pascal Coste and Jules Bourgoin. In 1869 de Forest and Church travelled, painted and shopped in Greece and the Middle East with their families. The purchases appear in both Olana and Lockwood de Forest’s first interior design commission − his parents’ New York house of 1876. De Forest’s main contribution to Olana came after he set up an studio of mastercraftmen in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat in 1880-81 for the production of woodwork, metalwork, and other decorative designs. This talk will go inside Olana on a virtual tour of elements and furniture provided by de Forest, mostly from his Indian studio, supplemented by images of
other work by de Forest and related Indian sources, with special reference to how he and Church collaborated at Olana.

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 been a member of the New Jersey Arab-American Heritage Commission, a state entity to which she was appointed by the governor. In 2011, she published the award-winning book Traditional Palestinian Costume: Origins and Evolution with Interlink Books, the result of 24 years of research about the origins of Middle Eastern textile arts and the evolution of Palestinian costumes and crafts.

As Frederic and Isabel Church travelled in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine in 1868, they commented on the “picturesque costumed individuals” (Isabel’s diary, 1868) they saw, inspiring them to bring back to Olana some costumes that are now some of the oldest extant Palestinian and Syrian costume items in any collection. They were featured in Church’s paintings of the Middle East, and were used in “a la Turque” parties at Olana. This collection will be reviewed in this presentation.

Frederic Church’s fascination with architectural decorations of the mansions in Damascus and Jerusalem that inspired the design of Olana also resulted in the acquisition of some “stones from a house in Damascus” (Church letter to W. Osborn, 1868) ) and numerous wall and door designs from Jerusalem that are on display at numerous locations at Olana. These will be highlighted.

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 necessary to fully appreciate our regions’ landscape art.

The 250 acres of land that comprise Frederic Church’s OLANA became the canvas for his pioneering endeavors in landscape architecture. Participants will learn about the geological history of Olana and the forces that shaped the 19th-century Hudson River School artist’s designed landscape. Specifically, Church contoured the grounds in order to create what are called “planned views.” Bob and Johanna Titus will visit three of Frederic Church’s best views and take us back in time to describe how the ice age glaciers sculpted them into the scenic sites that Church could tease from obscurity into landscape beauty. See the Hudson Valley and Olana’s landscape with new eyes—the eyes of scientists who see where science meets storytelling and time travel is possible.