May 4 marks the 200th birthday of Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), the Hudson River School painter who helped shape how Americans imagined Upstate New York.
Over at The Jiffy, a podcast about the arts and sciences of upstate, James Cave kicks off a three-part series marking the 200th Anniversary of Frederic Church’s birth. He starts at Olana, looking out at the same view Church called “the center of the world.”
He visits the Albany Institute of History and Art, which holds 72 letters between Church and his close friend Albany sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer. There, Curator Diane Shewchuk is in what she calls the “panic phase” of building an exhibition around those letters, because “Your Friend, Frederic E. Church” opens June 6.
In this podcast episode, Shewchuk walks listeners through how she writes, organizes, and builds an exhibition of this scale. The conversation moves through Palmer’s ink-stained desk, Church’s six-page travelogues from Beirut and Petra, a painting made for a child who died at two, and a very helpful freight elevator.
You can listen to the podcast episode here.
Read more about Frederic Church and the Hudson River School.
Illustration: “Twilight in the Wilderness” by Frederic Edwin Church, 1860.
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