Webinars

During this webinar, Julia B. Rosenbaum considers the first-floor interiors of his home at Olana not only as a deliberate composition—of a piece with his two-dimensional oeuvre—but as an aesthetic culmination of Frederic Church’s enduring engagement with issues of visual perception and bodily proprioception.

Presented in conjunction with Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and Our Contemporary Moment, this virtual lecture will focus on what Dr. Theodore E. Stebbins calls Martin Johnson Heade’s “topsy-turvy career.” During the presentation, Dr. Stebbins will provide a glimpse at some of his own changing thoughts on the painter, the circumstances of Heade’s rediscovery in 1943, and the way Heade’s reputation has continued to grow.

The Thomas Cole National Historic Site and The Olana Partnership at Olana State Historic Site present a discussion with artists Paula Hayes, Lisa Sanditz, and beekeeper Chris Layman from Fox Apiary. In this webinar, our guests examine the connections between art, ecology, environmental stewardship, and our role in local habitats.

In this webinar, The Olana Partnership’s Curatorial Assistant, Allegra K. Davis, will examine the life and work of Marianne North through the lenses of Victorian gender roles and practices of imperial science, while drawing parallels between Church and North as travelers, painters, and ultimately, collectors on a global scale.

Join artists Sayler/Morris, Rachel Sussman, and Dr. Scott Manning Stevens as they discuss the connections between art, ecology, and climate change. Sussman’s photographic series The Oldest Living Things in the World and Sayler/Morris’s video installation Eclipse are included in Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and Our Contemporary Moment, on view at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and Olana State Historic Site. The panel will be co-moderated by Cross Pollination Co-Curators Kate Menconeri and Will Coleman.

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.

Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819-1897) and Frederic Church (1826-1900) were two near-contemporary visual artists of fierce ambition and enormous talent. They inhabited the same New York art world, traveled extensively in the service of their art, and earned critical acclaim across the United States and Europe. Katherine Manthorne will probe the roles that family background, faith and gender played in their individual searches for success and home.

In the U.S., one of the earliest and most passionate discussions around the fine arts and their role in defining American identity and national aspirations took place over neoclassical sculpture. In the 19th century, Mary Edmonia Lewis (1845-1907), the first woman of Ojibwe and African American descent to gain international acclaim as a sculptor, entered these conversations. In this presentation, Professor Kirsten Buick will explore the impact of Lewis’s career on the most compelling debates of her day–the fight to abolish slavery, True Womanhood, spirituality, and how the U.S. would resolve its relationship to its Indigenous populations.

During this Olana Perspectives Webinar, Jennifer Raab, Associate Professor in the History of Art at Yale, will investigate how Frederic Church’s travels through the Middle East and his paintings of Jerusalem and Petra shaped his Hudson Valley home and masterpiece, Olana. Raab is the author of Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (2015), which considers a selection of Church’s major landscape paintings in light of scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century.

Have you ever wondered what kind of work goes into caring for the delicate and diverse permanent collection of Olana and readying works of art for exhibition? In this talk, we’ll hear from one of the nationally prominent conservators who care for the collections of the New York state historic sites network. Michele Phillips will offer a lively glimpse into the particular challenges of dealing with old works of art on paper, including drawings, documents, engravings, and photographs.

This talk by one of the world’s leading scholars and advocates of Mexico’s rich tradition of textile art will focus on a little known story in Olana’s diverse collections. Marta Turok takes as her focus Olana’s important holdings of uncannily well preserved “rebozos,” traditional shawls primarily used by indigenous women that were purchased by the Church family during their travels in Mexico. She will give a brief overview of the history of the Mexican rebozo and share the challenges facing the future of this emblematic garment, including activities being undertaken for its revitalization.

One of our country’s most prominent curator-scholars shares the unique perspective of his decades-long engagement with Frederic Church and Olana. This personal reflection looks back on how he came to know Church, to study him and his work seriously in graduate school, to work as a curator of his work in groundbreaking exhibitions and publications, and brings the story down to the present day with his bird’s-eye view of the recent fate of Church’s work, including rediscoveries, new research, and the art market.

Frederic Church, America’s first international art star, returned from his travels through the Near East in 1869 filled with inspiration for the great house that he planned to build on his property near Hudson, New York. He turned to Calvert Vaux, an architect well known for his successful collaborations with landscape designers, particularly Church’s friend Frederick Law Olmsted. Dr. Sean Sawyer, the Washburn and Susan Oberwager President of The Olana Partnership, will explore the intensely collaborative design partnership that produced Olana’s Main House.

What kind of world is it that Frederic Church was creating in his Persian-inspired home on the Hudson? This lecture proposes some answers to this question by analyzing three of the interior sightlines within his home and considering the way each distinctively engages with visual cultures of the Near East.

Among the works kept at Olana are a group of ceramic tiles and objects attributed to Ali Muhammad Isfahani, a master of ceramic production active in Iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century during the late Qajar period (1789-1925). This presentation examines the imagery, iconography, and provenance of this corpus, particularly focusing on the figural tiles installed at two fireplaces at Olana.