Events

Afterglow explores Frederic Church’s elegiac use of the landscape genre in depth for the first time, centering on the exciting loans of rarely seen memorial works by Church from major private collections: To the Memory of Cole (1848) and The Evening Star (1858). By uniting the majority of Church’s memorial paintings, this exhibition unveils a little-known aspect of Olana’s legacy: Frederic Church held a reputation as a maker of memorial art, returning to the medium of landscape throughout his career to create solace in times of loss. This sequence of Church’s memorial paintings, also notably including The After Glow (1867, Olana State Historic Site), reveals an iconography of grief and remembrance related to the rising view of nature as a source of comfort, health, and spiritual well-being. The exhibition places these works in the context of the period’s material and visual culture of mourning to present new scholarship on landscape paintings as memorials in 19th-century America, focusing on the distinctive oeuvre of 19th-century America’s foremost landscape painter. At a moment of change in our national discourse around grief, as members of our community faced with loss increasingly turn to landscapes like Olana’s to find sanctuary, Afterglow considers these landscapes in a new light as spaces of remembrance and healing. By connecting the artwork of Church and his circle with contemporary concerns and practices of memorialization, this exhibition explores the significance of landscapes and the natural world in remembrance and finding peace among loss, now and in the past.