During this virtual webinar, learn more about Charles Ethan Porter’s accomplished still life and landscape paintings that were collected by prominent figures like Church and Mark Twain. Curator Erin Monroe will examine the challenges Porter faced navigating racial inequality and prejudices as a Black artist working in the post-Civil War era.

Presented in conjunction with SPECTACLE: Frederic Church and the Business of Art, this webinar focuses on what inspired Frederic Church’s “Great Picture.” Senior research scholar at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Kevin Avery explores the context and legacy of Church’s The Heart of the Andes and highlights the influence Alexander von Humboldt made on this great work.

Frederic Church based his large-scale painting The Heart of the Andes (1859) on his two trips to South America in 1853 and 1857. This webinar will explore how Church navigated the business side of his craft and ultimately ensured the painting’s place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In this talk, Eleanor Harvey takes us on a nocturnal voyage of discovery through some of Church’s most significant paintings. Central to this talk will be a close look at one of Church’s paintings, The Meteor of 1860, in which the artist took a significant current event and invested it with both scientific and political meaning.

Church’s collection of travel photography provides a new perspective on his work as a landscape painter and sheds light on the 19th-century philosophical outlook that the world was collectible and, consequently, knowable. During this webinar with independent photo historian Corey Keller, considers how making and collecting photographs offered a medium through which the world could be seen, sorted, and understood in Church’s time.

A walk and discussion about how human hands shape the landscape and how the land transforms us. During this program, Laura Chávez Silverman, founding naturalist of The Outside Institute, guides participants in accessing their curiosity and sense of awe in nature.