Webinars
Perspectives on Landscape, Language, and Indigeneity: A Conversation With Artist Mark Igloliorte
March 23, 2023
During this virtual webinar, learn more about the work of contemporary artist Mark Igloliorte, who is included in Olana’s current exhibition, Chasing Icebergs: Art and a Disappearing Landscape, on view until March 26. Mark Igloliorte (Inuk, Nunatsiavut) is an artist, essayist and educator whose work explores Indigenous futures and identity. 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.
Mark Igloliorte is an Inuk interdisciplinary artist and educator from Nunatsiavut, Labrador. His artistic work is primarily painting and drawing. He received a Bachelor of Education from Memorial University, his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and his MFA from Concordia University. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, notably at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Quebec Triennial at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and as part of the touring exhibition Beat Nation. His work is currently included in Chasing Icebergs: Art and a Disappearing Landscape on view at Olana State Historic Site until March 26.
Franchesca Hebert-Spence currently resides in Ottawa is Anishinaabe from Winnipeg, Manitoba, her grandmother Marion Ida Spence was from Sagkeeng First Nation, on Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is a PhD student in Cultural Mediations (Visual Culture) at Carleton University exploring the presence of guest/host protocols within Indigenous methodological practices with a focus on visual art in Canada.
Moving Art, Moving Audiences: Nineteenth-Century Travelling Exhibitions and the Matter of Abolition
February 7, 2023
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. Tune in to consider the mobilization of images to abolish slavery, and the regimes of race, sentiment, and spectacle that would be confronted in so doing.
Caitlin Meehye Beach, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Affiliated Faculty in African & African American Studies at Fordham University. Her teaching and research focus on transatlantic art histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with special attention to the enduring effects of colonialism, slavery, migration, and racial capitalism. Published by University of California Press, Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery is her first book and a recipient of The Phillips Collection Book Prize.
This webinar recording is available upon request, please email education@olana.org.
The View from Olana: Preserving America’s Cultural Landscape
January 12, 2023
In 1977, a proposed nuclear power plant on the west bank of the Hudson River threatened scenic views from Olana. The potential visual impact of the proposed project on Frederic Church’s view from Olana was instrumental in denying approval for the plant. Years later, similar arguments were used to prevent the construction of an immense cement plant north of Olana, once again using the site’s integral viewshed to protect historic landscapes.
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.
Harvey K. Flad is Professor Emeritus of Geography at Vassar College (1972-2004), former Chair of the Geography and Earth Sciences department, and founding member of the American Studies, Environmental Studies and Urban Studies programs. Dr. Flad’s scholarship has focused on cultural and historical landscapes and environmental and urban planning. He has published numerous articles on 19th century landscape design theory and practice, including the influence of the Hudson River School of Art and the work of Andrew Jackson Downing. His legal testimonies on the visual/aesthetic impact of a proposed nuclear power plant in 1979 and a massive cement plant in 2005, were instrumental in preserving the views from Olana.
The Intrepid Quest for Church’s “Icebergs”
Thursday, November 17, 2022
What happens when an artist and his travel companion set forth to chase icebergs? The immediate result is a suite of drawings and oil sketches created to inspire future paintings, and a travelogue written to draw attention to the artist’s dedication to his craft. Frederic Church’s massive painting, The Icebergs, painted shortly after the trip, is the capstone of that adventure. But the painting soon embarked on its own journey across the Atlantic to England, where it was presumed lost for more than a century. During this virtual webinar, Eleanor Jones Harvey will recount that voyage, which encompasses inspiration, accolades, disappearance, and rediscovery. Registration to this live webinar is free for members. This program will be recorded and available online.
Eleanor Jones Harvey is senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). She earned a B.A. with distinction in art history from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in the history of art from Yale University. She organized the widely-praised exhibition The Civil War and American Art (SAAM and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2012-2013). Her most recent exhibition was Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture, (SAAM, 2020-2021). From 1992-2002 she was Curator of American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, where she organized the exhibition The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church’s Arctic Masterpiece in 2002 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the gift of the painting to the museum.
Impressions of Niagara through the Vantage Point of Black Escape Artists, Black Activists, and Landscape Artist Frederic Church
Thursday, November 3, 2022
Niagara Falls separates the United States and Canada and in the 19th Century, Blacks employed international lines to pit the two nations against one another for the best possible outcomes. As Blacks from both countries crossed a fluid border marked by two-way movement and social collaboration, they were in awe of the Falls famously captured on canvas by Frederic Church in 1867. Against the backdrop of the picturesque Falls, Blacks cultivated a global and green outlook, developing the Niagara Movement which birthed the NAACP in the midst of Niagara’s wonders, whirlpools, and waves. During this webinar, Daniel J. Broyld will examine how Niagara, a vitally important painting subject for Church, speaks to a larger transformative transnational environment with potent importance for Blacks in the 19th century and beyond.
Daniel J. Broyld is an associate professor of African American History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He earned his PhD in nineteenth-century United States and African Diaspora History at Howard University. His work focuses on the American–Canadian borderlands and issues of Black identity, migration, and transnational relations as well as oral history, material culture, and museum-community interactions. broyld was a 2017-18 Fulbright Canada scholar at Brock University and his book Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region During the Final Decades of Slavery (2022) was recently published with the Louisiana State University Press.
