A three-part podcast series about the painter who taught America how to reexamine its place in the world through landscape art – three conversations with the women keeping his story alive.
Frederic Edwin Church, “Twilight in the Wilderness,” 1860.
Curator Diane Shewchuk walks us through a new exhibition about Church and his friendship with sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer, and we see how much these two artists meant to each other and to this region.
Frederic Edwin Church, “Evening Star,” 1858.
Historian Victoria Johnson, author of a new biography of Church, sits with us in his Cosy Cottage and walks us through the life he lived across the country (and world) he called “glorious.”
Frederic Edwin Church, “Cosy Cottage,” 1870–72.
Betsy Jacks, executive director emerita of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, on what it means to rebuild a legacy – and define her own.
Frederic Edwin Church, “To the Memory of Cole,” 1848.
rederic Church was born 200 years ago this year, and I’ve been very excited about it. He spent his life painting the American landscape at a time when the country was still figuring itself out (still, clearly, unresolved).
It was a time when the U.S. was in civil war, swallowing a continent, and becoming an industrial power, and Church’s canvases were his argument about how he processed this.
But Church also traveled the world, and, as Victoria Johnson puts it in her new biography, “Glorious Country” – the first to bring us his life under this context – he brought the world to America and America to the world.
Johnson’s book arrives at a really resonant moment, and Church’s landscapes weren’t just romanticized decoration. He used art to share his views on slavery, legacy, memory; his contemporaries could read fluently in a visual language that we’ve largely forgotten how to speak.
The biography is, in part, a translation project, and reading it, we get a much fuller view of who Church was as a painter, and as a leading figure in American history. Church’s work helped to shape the vision most of us have of an “upstate New York” today.
This page hosts a three-part podcast series that looks at Church’s history and legacy. Diane Shewchuk, the director of curatorial affairs at the Albany Institute of History & Art reads us his letters. Victoria Johnson walks us through the country (and world) he called “glorious.” Betsy Jacks explains what it means to keep a legacy alive when your own legacy is calling.
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“I want to go back to the period of the 1840s. Like, what brought them to the Capital Region? This is such a sense-of-place story.”
“To me, he models something that we don’t think of as coexisting, but a robust patriotism coexisting with a fierce admiration for the cultures of the world. And I love that combination. I love that he embodies those two things.”
“I think to be an artist, you have to have a lot of irrational optimism, because in actuality, it’s a life of a lot of rejection. People don’t need art like they need dinner. They don’t have to go out and buy it every day.”
James Cave is the editor of The Jiffy and host of its companion podcast. He lives and works in the Hudson Valley, where he reports on the artists, scientists, and cultures to share stories of rural America through the lens of upstate New York.