December 21, 2021

In the mid-nineteenth century, what we think were the Christmas celebrations of today were actually just beginning. In this virtual lecture, Historic New England’s Ken Turino narrates the history of female abolitionists in America and their contributions to the development of modern American Christmas traditions. These abolitionists, including Maria Chapman and Lydia Marie Child, hosted Christmas fairs to raise money for the abolitionist cause. Turino looks at the Sewing Circles both abroad and across America that contributed a wide array of goods for sale at these fairs. These fairs had a wide-ranging influence on a number of Christmas traditions, including the adoption of greenery and the Christmas tree in America.

Ken Turino is a curator, educator, director, producer, and author. As Manager of Community Partnerships and Resource Development at Historic New England, he oversees community engagement projects throughout the region and is responsible for the exhibitions at the Sarah Orne Jewett Museum and Visitor Center in South Berwick, Maine and the Langdon House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His films have been shown on PBS and he has curated recent exhibitions such as “Cultural Keeper, Cultural Maker,” paintings of Richard Haynes. Ken’s most recent publication, with Max von Balgooy in 2019, is Reinventing the Historic House Museum, New Approaches and Proven Solutions, for Rowman & Littlefield. He has served on the Council for the American Association for State and Local History and currently has a book on the history of Christmas in development.

December 9, 2021

Frederic Edwin Church arrived in New Granada on April 28th,1853 seeking inspiration from the tropical landscape that was previously recorded by Alexander von Humboldt in Cosmos (1845). This talk will follow the trail left by Church while crossing the territory of current-day Colombia, characterized by his fascination with what he encountered and the great discomforts of navigating the complex geography and culture. Food, birds, plants, people, and astonishing views were part of his adventure and recorded through sketches, letters, and a bilingual diary. In this virtual program, Professor Verónica Uribe will discuss how Church fed his visual memory and brought these memories to life through his well-known paintings of the tropics.

Verónica Uribe has a BFA (2000), and an MFA (2001) from the Australian National University and a PhD in Humanities from the Universidad Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona (2009). She is Associate Professor in Art History at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia and currently chairs the Art History Department in the same University (2017-present). She recently won a Terra Foundation for American Art Academic Grant (2019) and has recently been invited as a Getty Research Institute Scholar (2022). She has published three books in Spanish on sketchbooks, traveling painters, and representations of bridges in nineteenth-century Colombia.

November 18, 2021

Join Dr. Elizabeth Stack, Executive Director of the Irish American Heritage Museum in Albany, and Daniel W. Bigler, Historic Site Assistant at Olana State Historic Site, for a virtual presentation and conversation about the lives of Irish American servants hired at Frederic Church’s Olana. This conversation will use the Church’s history of employing Irish immigrants as a framework to consider the network of Irish domestic servants that existed in the region during the 19th century. Through their dialogue, the speakers will consider how Olana functioned as both a workplace and a home for Irish immigrants and take a broader look at the lives of domestic servants and the challenges they faced during this period.

Photo credit: Peter Aaron/OTTO

November 4, 2021

As a renowned landscape painter, Frederic Church had long grappled with how to capture the vibrantly animated world around him. His paintings and drawings attest to both the heights he achieved in these efforts as well as their vexing limits. With his foray into house building in the early 1870s, Church moved into an immersive, three-dimensional format for his art, manipulating space and daylight as artistic materials. During this webinar, Julia B. Rosenbaum (Bard College) considers the first-floor interiors of his home at Olana not only as a deliberate composition—of a piece with his two-dimensional oeuvre—but as an aesthetic culmination of his enduring engagement with issues of visual perception and bodily proprioception.

Julia B. Rosenbaum focuses on nineteenth and early twentieth-century American visual material. Author of Visions of Belonging, a professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College and has served as consulting Director of Research and Publications at The Olana Partnership.

photo credit: Peter Aaron/OTTO

October 19, 2021

Join us in welcoming Dr. Theodore E. Stebbins, former curator at the Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard’s Fogg Museum for a virtual lecture on what he calls Martin Johnson Heade’s “topsy-turvy career.” During this virtual presentation, Dr. Stebbins will provide a glimpse at some of his own changing thoughts on the painter, the circumstances of Heade’s rediscovery in 1943, and the way Heade’s reputation has continued to grow. He will also focus on Heade’s special relationship with Frederic E. Church and the various ways that Heade’s work has been interpreted by scholars in recent years. Dr. Stebbins has been studying Martin Johnson Heade’s work since 1965 and organized the landmark exhibition of Heade’s work at the MFA in 1999. In 2000, he published Heade’s catalogue raisonne, listing his 621 authentic paintings.

This virtual lecture is presented by The Thomas Cole National Historic Site and The Olana Partnership at Olana State Historic Site in conjunction with Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and Our Contemporary Moment, a joint exhibition created by Thomas Cole National Historical Site, The Olana Partnership at Olana State Historic Site, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.

September 15, 2021

The Thomas Cole National Historic Site and The Olana Partnership at Olana State Historic Site present a discussion with artists Paula Hayes, Lisa Sanditz, and beekeeper Chris Layman from Fox Apiary. In this webinar, our guests examine the connections between art, ecology, environmental stewardship, and our role in local habitats.