Description

The Olana Partnership (TOP) is organizing the exhibition “Terraforming: Olana’s Historic Photography Collection Unearthed,” which draws from Olana’s little-known collection of over 7,000 nineteenth-century photographic prints, amassed by Frederic Church and including works by Carlton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy O’Sullivan, and Mathew Brady. The exhibition is co-curated by TOP’s curatorial team and the contemporary Afro-Caribbean artist David Hartt, who will also create two commissioned works. Over 130 photographs (including many believed to be unique) will be shown within a conventional gallery environment and online for a wider audience. The curatorial concept of terraforming—human culture’s reshaping of nature in ways that makes it impossible to discern a distinction between the untouched nature and the built environment–resonates with Church’s 40 year-long development of the earthwork that is Olana. The exhibition will also explore how early photographic technology was quickly put in the service of the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and cartography, and will add considerably to the understanding of a little- documented collection from a decolonial and antiracist perspective. The proposed grant would support the online virtual exhibition and a complimentary bilingual (English and Spanish) exhibition pamphlet,