'Frederic Church: Global Artist' opens May 17 at Olana State Historic Site

HUDSON―The Olana Partnership announced today the opening of Frederic Church: Global Artist on Sunday, May 17 at Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, New York. The exhibition commemorates the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederic Church (1826– 1900).

“We are thrilled to present a landmark exhibition that firmly places Frederic Church as an artist who sought to bring the beauty and scientific wonder of the world to the United States,” said Sean Sawyer, Washburn and Susan Oberwager President of The Olana Partnership.

Church was celebrated as a preeminent American landscape artist whose life and work was indelibly shaped by global travel that effectively brought the world to America. 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 Middle East, and in his final decades he made 15 winter sojourns in Mexico. Olana, the designed landscape and home overlooking the Hudson River that he built with his wife Isabel, reflects his global travel and collections.

Elizabeth Kornhauser, Consulting Senior Curator and Chair of The Church 200 Committee, The Olana Partnership shared, “Frederic Church: Global Artist, brings together a number of Church’s finest monumental oil paintings, and exquisite drawings and oil sketches that are indelibly shaped by his life of global travel. Widely exhibited in the United States and Europe during his lifetime, the artist’s paintings won a new level of respect for American art both in the United States and abroad. Church’s global ambition embodying the central scientific and political dilemmas of his lifetime is explored in the exhibition and accompanying book, providing fresh new insights that redefine this artist for contemporary audiences.”

Frederic Church: Global Artist examines the artist in his own time and demonstrates his continuing relevance for today’s audiences. Widely exhibited in the United States and Europe during his lifetime, the artist’s paintings won a new level of respect for American art. Frederic Church: Global Artist will unite the broad range of media he mastered, including drawings and oil sketches from Church’s travels with examples of his large, extravagantly detailed paintings produced for public exhibition. Works from the artist’s exceptional collection of photographs will be shown. In addition to rarely seen works from the Olana collection, the exhibition will feature consummate 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.

Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University, added, “The exhibition Frederic Church: Global Artist reveals the extent of Frederic Church's artistic ambition as a global traveler in the age of empires. It explores his fascination with the natural world, with the hemispheric cultures and histories of the Americas, the Caribbean and the Middle East, and presents Olana as the outcome of his world-wide entanglements. The accompanying book presents lively and original essays by a group of scholars reassessing Church's contribution beyond the local and national, as an artist of global significance.”

The exhibition is organized by Elizabeth Kornhauser, Curator Emerita, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Senior Consulting Curator for The Olana Partnership, Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University and Jennifer Raab, Professor of the History of Art at Yale University.

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 Tim Barringer, Elizabeth Kornhauser, and Jennifer 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.

The exhibition will be presented in the Sharp Family Gallery at Olana State Historic Site through October 25.

Frederic Church: Global Artist is organized in coordination with Frederic Church 200, an initiative led by The Olana Partnership in 2026 to mark the 200th anniversary of the artist’s birth in 1826. Frederic Church 200 will celebrate and extend Church’s legacy through exhibitions and programs at museums across the United States and internationally. A number of public programs and special exhibition tours have been organized to complement the exhibition. Please visit https://olana.org/fc200/ for updates and more information.