Frederick Church: Global Artist

Frederic Edwin Church, Cayambe, 1858, The New York Historical. Robert L. Stuart Collection, gift of his widow, Mrs. Mary Stuart, S- 91

The life and work of Frederic Church (1826–1900) was indelibly shaped by global travel. Early trips took him to South America, across the northeastern United States, to Jamaica, and to the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Later he visited Europe and the Near Middle East, and in his final decades he made 15 winter sojourns in Mexico. The designed landscape, global collections, and striking architecture of the home he and his wife Isabel named “Olana” reflect the many worlds through which he traveled.

Frederic Church: Global Artist examines the artist in his own time and demonstrates his continuing relevance for today’s audiences. Co-curated by Elizabeth Kornhauser, Tim Barringer, and Jennifer Raab, Frederic Church: Global Artist will unite drawings and oil sketches from Church’s travels with examples of his large, extravagantly detailed paintings produced for public exhibition. In addition to rarely seen works from the Olana collection, the exhibition will feature loans from a number of major public and private collections, including the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, The New York Historical, and The Terra Foundation for American Art.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a groundbreaking new publication from Yale University Press in association with The Olana Partnership, also titled Frederic Church: Global Artist, co-edited by Barringer, Kornhauser, and Raab. This lavishly illustrated volume features original essays by scholars from across the humanities that reveal Church as an artist whose works engage with questions of industrialization and environmental destruction, the rise and fall of empires, the construction of national identity, and the cataclysmic effects of slavery and civil war.