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.

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 will focus on two Civil War-era works, Our Banner in the Sky and Our Flag, to examine Church’s working process more closely.

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.

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. Christopher Oliver will consider Church’s painting of the following year, The Natural Bridge, Virginia, and its preparatory sketches in relation to the Natural Bridge’s contemporary associations with American history, western expansion, and slavery.

During this presentation, learn more about Jean Shin’s work and her new project, Fallen, which brings attention to the loss of this once-majestic hemlock on Olana’s main lawn. Fallen invites viewers to reflect on this tree’s life and the cultural history of this region. 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.