The Annual Ida Brier Archival Webinar – Composing Olana with Writer Annik LaFarge

Learn more about Composing Olana, a new book devoted to illustrating why Frederic Church’s designed masterwork matters so profoundly in the history of American art and public parks. During a dynamic conversation with Olana’s archivist, explore LaFarge’s process of revealing the history of what we can and cannot see throughout Olana’s historic carriage roads. Discover how LaFarge unpacks Olana’s greater landscape by drawing on archival letters, diaries, historic accounts, interviews and photographs revealing everything from the Ice Age geology that created it to the artists and conservationists who preserved it. This virtual webinar is FREE. 

Annik LaFarge is a writer, editor, photographer, and lecturer who has been writing about American parks and landscapes since 2008. Author of On the High Line (Fordham University Press/Empire State Editions, 2024), and Chasing Chopin (Simon & Schuster, 2020), a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice,” her work has appeared numerous publications including the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Huff Post, and the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. She is a Trustee of the Waterfront Museum in Brooklyn.

Clare Flemming is the Research Archivist for The Olana Partnership where every day is a new discovery into current scholarship about Frederic Church, his life, his land, and his legacy, as well as the exciting records of the Partnership and its visionary predecessors. Clare has served as archivist in a wide range of collections from Philly to Albany, mostly in natural-history settings, from tiny historic societies to huge government archives and as an adjunct professor in the Archives Management tract at SUNY, University at Albany.