Thomas Cole Site announces ‘Emily Cole & Valerie Hegarty: Life Cycles’

CATSKILL―The Thomas Cole National Historic Site announced Tuesday a new spotlight exhibition titled “Emily Cole & Valerie Hegarty: Life Cycles.” It opens on Friday, March 13 and runs through December.

The exhibition presents a visual dialogue between two craft-based women artists across three centuries: 19th-century artist Emily Cole, daughter of Thomas Cole, and 21st-century artist Valerie Hegarty. The exhibition will take place in the Sitting Room Gallery of the 1815 Main House of the Thomas Cole Site on Spring Street in Catskill.

The exhibition will juxtapose more than 30 works of painted porcelain and works on paper by Emily Cole with a mixed-media installation by Valerie Hegarty titled “Emily Cole and Her Father, My Mother and Me (Thomas Cole’s View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, Blackberries, Wild Flowers, Robins, Nest, and Wallpaper).”

The work by Hegarty was made specifically for the Thomas Cole Site in 2025 and explores the connection between Thomas Cole and Emily Cole and their fascination with cycles of life, while considering Hegarty’s own relationship with her mother, who is now experiencing dementia and who inspired her craft-related artistry. Even across centuries, those dynamics remain powerfully relevant.

“I identify with Emily Cole, a female artist who ran her own business using craft-based work to explore life cycles in contrast to the more revered artistry of her father’s oil paintings,” noted Hegarty.

“Like her, I don’t believe in a hierarchy of artist methods and materials. I look for powerful expression in whatever media seem most appropriate to the subject. Emily Cole painted flowers not in a decorative way but in a naturalistic way―her close-up renderings suggesting a one-on-one relationship with the flower as opposed to her father’s more ‘God’s eye view’ of the landscape,” Hegarty said.

“In doing so, she positions humans and nature as equals. Although still-life’s of flowers were considered a proper subject for women at the time, wildflowers have the subversive power to subsume a painting, crack a foundation, and plant seeds for new generations. Emily Cole makes the cycles of life come to life, even as they anticipate decline,” she added.

The work by Hegarty, now installed in the gallery that was once Emily Cole’s childhood bedroom, draws upon and reflects Thomas Cole’s iconic painting The Oxbow, Emily Cole’s painted flora, and decorations from Hegarty’s own childhood home.  

“I wanted to create a metaphoric collaboration between Emily Cole and her father to complicate the layers of history, fabrication, and recreation in this historic home. By embedding layers of wallpaper referencing rooms from my childhood home, I can insert myself and my mother within the historic narrative,” Hegarty said.

“In my installation, three dimensional renderings of the flowers from Emily Cole’s watercolors and ceramics break through her father’s painting The Oxbow. Behind the painting, the wallpaper of the sitting room appears to push away from the wall, revealing a layer of wall with pink wallpaper—the color of my childhood bedroom—behind which is a fragment of wall with floral wallpaper—the wallpaper that was in my mother’s bedroom when I was a child,” she added.

Emily Cole (1843-1913) was the daughter of transformational artist Thomas Cole (1801 1848) and created her own successful artistic career. While Emily was only five years old when her father died, she grew up within 19th-century artistic circles. She became an esteemed professional artist in her own right and created a striking body of dynamic botanicals on porcelain and watercolors on paper, depicting flowers and plants at or near her Hudson Valley home that she could observe first-hand across seasonal cycles. While many china painters of the period depicted botanicals in full bloom, Emily painted flora in all stages of life from expectant bud to wilting stems. In doing so, she explored nature close-up in contrast to her father’s legendary broad vistas, while continuing his legacy of depicting cycles of life. Where he focused on oil painting, however, she excelled at painting on porcelain.

An active artist for more than 40 years, Emily Cole exhibited and sold her art in New York City and the Hudson Valley, received critical acclaim, traveled internationally, studied at the National Academy of Design, and was a founding member in 1892 of the New York Society of Ceramic Arts, an organization that advocated for decorated ceramics to be exhibited in museum galleries. She had a kiln on the Catskill property to fire her painted 2 porcelain as well as the work of other china painters. The Thomas Cole Site holds the largest-known collection of Emily Cole’s surviving artwork.

Hegarty is a New York City-based artist who makes paintings, sculptures, and installations that explore issues of memory, place, and history. She relishes the materiality of her process, incorporating a range of materials such as canvas, wood, Foamcore, paper mache, epoxy, and ceramics. Her large-scale installation work incorporates a process she calls “reverse archeology” in which layers of painted paper are adhered to the walls and floors of the gallery and then scraped back to create a material memory of a space. Although representational, her works contain surprising juxtapositions and uncanny transformations where materials and meanings are constantly shifting.

“Valerie Hegarty’s artistry reveals an entirely new way of considering the artistry of Emily Cole,” said Maura O’Shea, executive director of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site.

“Separated by centuries, their work comes together in this exhibition to share their love of nature and natural life, their fascination with the qualities of ceramics and craft, and their own experiences with generational influences. It’s a truly illuminating mix,” said O’Shea.

An opening reception for the spotlight exhibition will be held at the Thomas Cole Site on Friday, March 13, from 4:30 to 6 p.m., with an artist’s talk by Hegarty at 4 p.m. for members. For more information, visit thomascole.org.

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