Location: Charles Knox Smith Hall, 9201 Germantown Avenue

with Elizabeth Kornhauser, Consulting Senior Curator and Chair of The Church 200 Committee for The Olana Partnership; formerly the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture,  Metropolitan Museum of Art 

The year 2026 marks the 200th anniversary of Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), the most renowned American landscape artist of his time.  This talk will explore the ways in which global travel indelibly shaped his life and work.  It will examine Church as an artist whose works engaged with questions of industrialization and environmental destruction, the rise and fall of empires, the construction of national identity, and the cataclysmic effects of slavery and civil war. 

Dr. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser is Curator Emerita at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and following her retirement in 2023, was  appointed the Senior Curator and Chair, Frederic Church Bicentennial Committee for The Olana Partnership. She served as Co-curator and co-author for the exhibition and catalogue: Frederic Church: Global Artist, currently on view at Olana until October 25, 2026.  At The Met she completed work on the new American Paintings and Sculpture galleries which opened in January 2012, and added transformative acquisitions to the collection.  She served as co-curator for the major exhibition: Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, which opened at the Met on January 30, 2018, and traveled to the National Gallery, London, on June 11, 2018. Betsy was also the Co-curator for the following exhibitions at the Met:  Rediscovering Thomas Hart Benton’s “America Today” Murals, 2014; Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River, 2015; and John Singer Sargent’s Portraits of the Arts: Artists, Writers, Actors, and Musicians, 2015.   

She served in a variety of roles as Deputy Director and Chief Curator, and Krieble Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art from 1985 to 2010.  Her special exhibitions (all of which traveled) and accompanying catalogues for the Wadsworth Atheneum include: American Moderns on Paper, (Yale University Press, 2010-11); Neue Welt: Erfindung der Amerikanischen Malerie ( New World: Discovering an American Art, 2007), an international project with the Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, Germany; Samuel Colt: Arms, Art, and Invention  (Yale University Press, 2006); Marsden Hartley (Yale University Press, 2003); Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe & American Modernism (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 1999); New Worlds from Old: 19th-Century Australian & American Landscapes (National Gallery of Art, Canberra, Australia, 1998); Joseph Cornell: Box Constructions and Collages (1997); Thomas Cole: Landscape Into History (1994); and Ralph Earl: The Face of the Young Republic (Yale University Press, 1991).  Her catalogue for the Ralph Earl exhibition won the 1992 Frances Tavern Museum Book Award.