Join Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, multidisciplinary artist and teaching professional and professor Myra Armstead for a virtual presentation and conversation about the lives of black Americans during the time of Olana’s creation. During this program, Sovak will introduce his series, a-Historical Landscapes, a current project which involves altering 19th-century landscape engravings to include contemporaneous images borrowed from Anti-Slavery publications.

Join artist Portia Munson and conservationist Kathryn Schneider as they discuss Munson’s artwork onsite at Olana, Memento Mori Mandalas. During this presentation, learn more about Munson’s work, which memorializes and honors creatures that have paid the price of humanity’s harsh impact on the land.

May 18, 2021

While Frederic Church won acclaim during his lifetime for his skills as a painter, a focus solely on Church’s paintings ignores his technical experimentation in multiple media, including drawing and printmaking. In this virtual webinar, Maura Lyons (Drake University) will focus on two Civil War-era works, Our Banner in the Sky and Our Flag, to examine Church’s working process more closely. Lyons will highlight her research using scientific techniques to examine Our Flag while working at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). These techniques allow us to see below the surface layers of paint to detect the presence of other media. Such examinations reveal Church’s working process, which resulted in a flexible visual language that spoke to both the general public and wealthy patrons.

May 11, 2021

The nineteenth-century German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt characterized his life’s work as an endeavor “to represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces.” In this presentation, Rachael Z. DeLue, Christopher Binyon Sarofim ’86 Professor in American Art at Princeton University, discusses the challenges presented by such an ambitious undertaking. Consideration of the extraordinary images devised by Humboldt to represent the multifarious phenomena of the natural world sets the stage for an exploration of work by artists like Frederic Church and Martin Johnson Heade, who followed in Humboldt’s footsteps in attempting to render the truth of nature, no matter how elusive, wondrous, or strange. From Humboldt’s teeming diagrams of South American mountain ranges to Heade’s exquisite paintings of hummingbirds, Prof. DeLue explores what it meant in the nineteenth century for artists and scientists to wrangle the natural world with pen, ink, and paint and why, so often, the task proved an impossible one.

April 28, 2021

In 1851 Frederic Church travelled through Virginia in the company of his patron Cyrus Field with the goal of reaching and painting that state’s most famous landscape, the Natural Bridge. Formerly the property of Thomas Jefferson, the Natural Bridge was frequently rendered by the pencil and brush of nineteenth century artists, very few of whom could escape the outsized legacy of the former President in crafting a popular conception of the Natural Bridge. Christopher Oliver will consider Church’s painting of the following year, The Natural Bridge, Virginia, and its preparatory sketches, which are in the collection of Olana, in relation to the Natural Bridge’s contemporary associations with American history, western expansion, and slavery.

April 14, 2021

Join artist Jean Shin as she shares the ideas and ecological urgency behind her new artwork onsite at Olana, Fallen. During this presentation, learn more about Shin’s work and this project, which brings attention to the loss of this once-majestic hemlock on Olana’s main lawn. When the artist Frederic Church created Olana’s 250-acre naturalistic landscape, he planted thousands of native trees on a hillside that had been previously logged and deforested. In the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of hemlocks were cut down for the tanning industry, which used the tannin in the tree’s bark for the commercial demands of leather-making. Fallen invites viewers to reflect on this tree’s life and the cultural history of this region. While reckoning with the devastating consequences of deforestation in the local history, Shin’s project invites viewers to observe their natural surroundings more closely and witness nature’s struggles. Through her work and during this webinar, Shin will consider how we can learn from the past and coexist without exploiting nature and how we can protect the hemlocks that remain for future generations.