WHAT’S MISSING?

Olana State Historic Site
June 14 – November 2, 2025
By Ellen Harvey and Gabriela Salazar
Commissioned by The Olana Partnership

Olana is the most intact historic artist’s environment in the United States, encompassing the Main House and its extensive collections, an historic farm complex, and the 250-acre naturalistic landscape designed by Frederic Church between 1860 and 1900. Despite its remarkable state of preservation, several of Olana’s extant structures dating to Church’s time were removed years prior to Olana becoming a National Historic Landmark and New York State Historic Site. In these structures’ absence, stories of the people who built and used them and the functions they served have also been lost.

Visible foundations and archaeological evidence survive for some of these missing structures. In other cases, only photographs, maps, or oral histories bear witness to their past existence. These buildings may have vanished, but their stories remain embedded within Olana’s landscape.

For What’s Missing?, The Olana Partnership commissioned artists Ellen Harvey and Gabriela Salazar to create site-specific outdoor artworks that respond to these missing pieces of Olana’s landscape history.

Harvey’s project, Winter in the Summer House, will activate the site of Olana’s “summer house,” a structure for which no physical evidence remains but was labeled on an 1886 landscape plan of Olana just below the Main House. Harvey’s installation will take the form of a hexagonal enclosed structure constructed entirely of gilded mirrors reflecting views of Olana’s landscape and viewshed.

Upon entering Harvey’s structure, visitors will be enveloped in a darkened space, with sunlight filtering through engraved lines on the mirrors’ reverse sides depicting the surrounding outside landscape covered in glaciers. These engravings serve both as an homage to Church’s paintings of icebergs and a commentary on the rapid effects of climate change.

Preliminary artist mockups, Winter in the Summer House, exterior (left) and interior (right). Courtesy Ellen Harvey.

Detail of “Plan of Olana,” 1886, indicating placement of the “Summer House” in the vicinity of the Main House and Stable. New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Olana State Historic Site, OL.1984.39.

Ellen Harvey is a British-born conceptual artist whose work ranges from guerrilla street interventions like her iconic New York Beautification Project for which she painted miniature landscapes over New York’s graffiti sites to immersive institutional installations and large-scale public artworks. Her work is painting-based but utilizes a wide variety of media and participatory strategies to explore several reoccurring themes such as the social and ecological implications of the picturesque, the revolutionary potential of nostalgia, the conflict between advertising and ornament in public space, the relationship between art and tourism and the role of art and the artist in our society. Her work is represented in numerous institutional collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Bass Museum of Art (Miami Beach), SMAK (Ghent, Belgium), Berkeley Museum of Art, Bunker Art Space (Palm Beach), Clay Center for the Arts & Sciences (West Virginia), Art Omi, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Princeton Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Gwangju Art Museum (Korea), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea (Santiago de Compostela, Spain) and the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), among others. Ellen lives and works in Brooklyn and is represented by Locks Gallery (Philadelphia) and Meessen Gallery (Brussels, Belgium).

Salazar’s project, A Measure of Comfort (Cake and Cord) will consist of two installations activating the foundations that remain of Olana’s woodshed and icehouse, both located in the historic farm complex. Salazar explores the duality of the structures’ former functions and the exploitation of natural resources they embodied—one storing ice for cooling and the other wood for heating.

Within the woodshed foundation Salazar will construct a wooden sculptural installation using exactly 1 cord of wood (a unit of measure for dry firewood equivalent to a well-stacked pile 4 feet in height and 8 feet in width) incorporating patterns inspired by the decorative wrought iron grills of the heating system within Olana’s Main House. An installation within the icehouse foundation will be made up of stainless-steel water vessels designed to mimic the size and shape of traditional hand-cut ice blocks or “cakes,” cut in Church’s time from the frozen pond at Olana and the Hudson River.