The Olana Partnership, in collaboration with the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, presents Terraforming: Olana’s Historic Photography Collection Unearthed at Olana State Historic Site. Inspired by Olana’s significant collection of nearly 2,000 19th century international photographic prints, artist and guest curator David Hartt reflects on the ways in which human culture and activity shape the land, eroding the boundary between human construction and the natural world, just as Frederic Church did in creating the 250-acre earthwork that is Olana. Through Hartt’s selection of historic photographs from Olana’s vast collection, the exhibition also explores what this global photographic collection tells us about Church’s painting practice, travels, and ways of knowing and collecting the world.

Terraforming will include historically significant works by photographers including Eadweard Muybridge, William James Stillman, and Claude-Joseph Désiré Charnay, as well as new site-specific work by David Hartt.

David Hartt (b. 1967, Montréal) lives and works in Philadelphia where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. His work unpacks the social, cultural, and economic complexities of his various subjects. He explores how historic ideas and ideals persist or transform over time. His solo exhibitions include The Histories at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Coloured Garden at The Glass House, Connecticut and the group exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work is in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, The RISD Museum, Providence, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Hartt is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, David Nolan Gallery, New York and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin.

This exhibition has been made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, support from the donors to The Olana Partnership’s Novak-Ferber Exhibitions Fund, and in-kind contributions by the NYS Bureau of Historic Sites, Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation. Support for the associated publication has been provided by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. David Hartt’s site-specific installation in Olana’s Historic Fern Garden is generously supported by Dianne Young and Jim Lewis. General support for The Olana Partnership’s programs is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Open every day from dawn to dusk

Project Overview
The Thomas Cole National Historic Site presents The Pollinator Pavilion, a new public artwork by internationally renowned artists Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood. The new artwork provides a fantastical architectural setting that offers miraculous moments in which individuals can encounter hummingbirds while exploring a nurturing relationship with nature. The Pollinator Pavilion was designed specifically for the Thomas Cole National Historic Site.

The artists created this interactive artwork to provide sustenance to pollinators and a place of wonder for human visitors, who may have an up-close encounter with these enchanting creatures, particularly the fleeting Ruby-throated hummingbird, an important pollinator and the only hummingbird species that lives in this region. The open-air, lavender painted Gothic style gazebo is filled with living pollinator gardens, feeders, original paintings by the artists, and seating for one guest at a time. Designed to attract pollinators and humans to share the same space, the pavilion creates a radical decontextualization in which individuals can see themselves as part of nature and understand their own capacity to foster an environment of ecological balance.

The Pollinator Pavilion is a 21 ½-foot-high, painted wood, architectural confection draped with flowers, plants, and paintings by the artists, designed as much for hummingbirds as for people. Sherwood and Dion have worked with living animals for years and their approach is to emphasize the animal as an individual that is best appreciated by an actual face-to-face encounter. The Pollinator Pavilion invites human viewers to slow down and allow the process of pollination and feeding to be observed with reverence and joy.

This work was originally inspired by the influential series of paintings known as The Gems of Brazil (1863-64) by the nineteenth-century artist, Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), a protégé of Frederic Church, who was in turn a protégé of Cole. The Gems of Brazil will be on view as part of the major traveling exhibition, Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church and our Contemporary Moment, created by the Thomas Cole Site (Catskill, NY), The Olana Partnership at Olana State Historic Site (Hudson, NY), and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), which will be presented jointly and open in full at the Thomas Cole Site and Olana State Historic Site in Spring 2021. The Pollinator Pavilion anticipates its arrival and will be a part of that exhibition, which was delayed by a year due to COVID-19.
From the Artists

“Thomas Cole delighted in nature and fantasy, and The Pollinator Pavilion shares that sense of delight. It creates a dialogue between architecture and nature that Cole would have relished.” Mark Dion

“We know that we have the capacity to destroy nature,” said Dana Sherwood. “Here art is enabling us to experience the wonder of co-existence with nature. It makes possible miraculous moments that can profoundly alter our sense of place within nature and our responsibility for it.” Dana Sherwood