Webinars

Presented in conjunction with the 2024 exhibition Afterglow: Frederic Church and the Landscape of Memory, this talk focuses on memorial paintings and objects associated with Frederic Church’s family. During this virtual webinar, Professor Susan L. Aberth will frame these practices within a wider context of American art history.

From the creation of Olana by the Church family starting in 1860 to its preservation as a historic site a century later, women have played a central and vital role in the story of this place. This virtual webinar will explore the untold histories of Olana’s female residents, their social circles, and their artistic contributions.

Over the past decade, Thomas Woltz and his firm have led the renewal and restoration of Frederic Church’s 250-acre designed landscape at Olana, a NY State Historic Site and National Historic Landmark. During this lecture, Woltz will focus on the vision within the award-winning Olana Strategic Landscape Design Plan, which includes the siting of the soon-to-be-completed Frederic Church Center for Art & Landscape.

What do Frederic Church’s landscapes, New York’s Central Park, and Niagara Falls Reservation have in common? In this virtual discussion, Rebecca Bedell argues that, beyond their shared aesthetics and Church’s involvement with all three, they are all, in a sense, memorial landscapes.

Join top interior designers Sheila Bridges and Young Huh for a very special virtual opportunity as they reflect on Frederic Church’s interior design aesthetic, sharing thoughts on the carefully curated rooms of his artist-designed house at Olana. This lively talk will be moderated by esteemed journalist Mitchell Owens.

How can landscape painting serve as a source of refuge and self-reflection in today’s challenging world? During this virtual webinar, Cuban American artist Lydia Rubio will discuss how her work reinterprets the notion of “landscape,” taking inspiration from Frederic Church and members of the “Hudson River School.”

During Church’s lifetime, the United States became the largest importer of coffee in the world, sourcing most of their product from Brazil. During this virtual webinar, Caroline Gillaspie will explore Brazil’s impressive agricultural exhibit at the 1876 U.S. Centennial exhibition alongside other artworks depicting coffee drinking in the United States as they reflected the developing taste for the beverage in the 19th century.

The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Church is an exquisite representation of the biological richness of these breathtaking landscapes, inviting curious eyes to explore every inch of this fabulous painting. During this virtual webinar, Dr. Mauricio Diazgranados will guide viewers through a journey traversing Church’s painting, sharing his photographs, adventures, and knowledge with over 30 years’ experience hiking and exploring the flora of these mountains.

During this virtual webinar, learn more about Charles Ethan Porter’s accomplished still life and landscape paintings that were collected by prominent figures like Church and Mark Twain. Curator Erin Monroe will examine the challenges Porter faced navigating racial inequality and prejudices as a Black artist working in the post-Civil War era.

Presented in conjunction with SPECTACLE: Frederic Church and the Business of Art, this webinar focuses on what inspired Frederic Church’s “Great Picture.” Senior research scholar at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Kevin Avery explores the context and legacy of Church’s The Heart of the Andes and highlights the influence Alexander von Humboldt made on this great work.

Frederic Church based his large-scale painting The Heart of the Andes (1859) on his two trips to South America in 1853 and 1857. This webinar will explore how Church navigated the business side of his craft and ultimately ensured the painting’s place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In this talk, Eleanor Harvey takes us on a nocturnal voyage of discovery through some of Church’s most significant paintings. Central to this talk will be a close look at one of Church’s paintings, The Meteor of 1860, in which the artist took a significant current event and invested it with both scientific and political meaning.

Church’s collection of travel photography provides a new perspective on his work as a landscape painter and sheds light on the 19th-century philosophical outlook that the world was collectible and, consequently, knowable. During this webinar with independent photo historian Corey Keller, considers how making and collecting photographs offered a medium through which the world could be seen, sorted, and understood in Church’s time.

A walk and discussion about how human hands shape the landscape and how the land transforms us. During this program, Laura Chávez Silverman, founding naturalist of The Outside Institute, guides participants in accessing their curiosity and sense of awe in nature.

During this workshop guided by Antonia Estela Pérez, participants will learn about several medicinal and food plants growing in Olana and how we can build mutually regenerative relationships.

Guest curator David Hartt discusses his artistic process and vision for Terraforming: Olana’s Historic Photography Collection Unearthed. Learn more about how Hartt was inspired by Olana’s collection of nearly 2,000 19th-century international photographic prints to reflect on the ways in which human culture and activity shape our land.

During this nature walk and workshop, Nkoula Badila, founder of Grow Black Hudson, guides participants through Olana’s landscape, discussing the health benefits of regional species and the ways we can connect with nature through movement and herbal medicine.

During this virtual webinar, learn more about the work of contemporary artist Mark Igloliorte, whose work featured in Olana’s exhibition Chasing Icebergs: Art and a Disappearing Landscape. During this presentation, he will track the ways language, landscape, and personal perspectives inform his work. A conversation with curator and scholar Franchesca Hebert-Spence will follow.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Americans faced a new way to encounter art: the traveling exhibition. Sculptures, panoramas, and paintings crisscrossed the country, appearing at venues that included exhibition and entertainment halls, galleries, reform societies, and fairs. During this virtual webinar, Caitlin Meehye Beach will explore the phenomenon of traveling exhibitions as they intersected a pressing concern of the day: the abolition of slavery. Following the publication of her 2022 book, Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery, this presentation focuses on three works in particular: Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave, Henry “Box” Brown’s The Mirror of Slavery, and Frederic Edwin Church’s The Icebergs.

This webinar recording is available upon request. Please email education@olana.org.

During this webinar, Harvey Flad, Professor Emeritus of Geography at Vassar College, will share a personal perspective on how Olana’s views have been saved. Join Flad during this examination of how historic and aesthetic landscape, and other aspects of “community character,” has become a valued component of environmental review.