WEBINAR – Solace in the Blue Mountains: Frederic Church in Jamaica
In April 1865, at the end of the US Civil War, Frederic Church and his wife, Isabel, sailed to the Caribbean seeking respite after the recent deaths of his two young children from diphtheria. In Jamaica, Church observed the majestic Jamaican landscape, executing hundreds of graphite sketches and oil studies while seeking personal solace. Yet, both the artist’s private anguish and the public turmoil that engulfed Jamaica in the late 19th century are absent from Church’s breathtaking works. Join Caitlin Condell, Curator & Head of Drawings, Prints & Graphic Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, to learn more about Church’s intimate Jamaica sketches and the context in which they were made. This program coincides with the exhibition Frederic Church in Jamaica, which celebrates the 200th anniversary of Frederic Church’s birth by drawing on Cooper Hewitt’s holdings of over 2,000 of the artist’s oil and graphite sketches. The exhibition is on view at Cooper Hewitt from October 30, 2026, to February 15, 2027.
Caitlin Condell is the curator and head of the Department of Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, where she oversees a collection of nearly 147,000 works on paper dating from the 14th century to the present. She has organized and contributed to numerous exhibitions and publications including Frederic Church in Jamaica (2026-2027), Underground Modernist: E. McKnight Kauffer (2021-2022), After Icebergs (2019-2020), Nature – Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial (2019-2020), Fragile Beasts (2016-2017), and How Posters Work (2015) at Cooper Hewitt, and Making Room: The Space Between Two and Three Dimensions (2012-2013) at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). She previously worked at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the department of Prints & Illustrated Books.
Palm Trees, June 1865, Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) Oil and graphite on paperboard H x W: 30.3 × 50.7 cm (11 15/16 × 19 15/16 in.) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-743-c
