At the center of the exhibition Cross Pollination: Heade, Church, Cole, and Our Contemporary Moment is an exploration of systems of pollination in both nature and ecology, as well as a metaphor for the interplay of art and science, and relationships among artists across generations. Including 85 works by 25 artists connecting the 19th century with the 21st, Cross Pollination is an exhibition that leans into the interplay of place and creativity, taking flight from Martin Johnson Heade's influential series of paintings The Gems of Brazil.

Cross Pollination is on display at both Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, New York and the Thomas Cole National Historic Site across the Hudson River in Catskill, New York. Developed with artists and scholars across disciplines, this exhibition addresses the continuing relevance of close observations of nature and the critical interconnections between pollinators and their habitats today. Both Frederic Church's Olana and the Thomas Cole National Historic Site are members of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Historic Artists' Homes and Studios program.

While Cross Pollination closes at the end of October 2021, we wanted to share a glimpse of the full experience from these two very special historic sites.

Martin Johnson Heade

At the center of this project is Heade’s unprecedented series The Gems of Brazil, which engaged his scientific curiosity as well as his sense of wonder. A self-declared “monomaniac” for hummingbirds, Heade traveled to Brazil in 1863 so that he could study and paint the birds in their natural habitats. The artist’s notebooks evidence his fascination with these pollinators and include careful observations about their behavior, nesting habits, coloration, and interactions with flowers and insects. The resulting series of intimate portrait-style bird and habitat paintings stood in contrast to scientific illustrations being made at the time, but they were also distinctive from the sweeping landscapes painted by his Tenth Street Studio contemporaries, such as Frederic Church. Heade was making a different kind of landscape, magnifying nature itself and illuminating the life cycles of these pollinators and their symbiotic relationships within their natural environment.

Thomas Cole and Frederic Church

For the exhibition at the historic artists' homes, 16 of Heade’s Gems paintings are presented in conversation with paintings, sketches, and natural specimen collections by Thomas Cole and Frederic Church. All shared these practices as a way to engage close observations of nature. Church, who shared a studio and was lifelong friends with Heade, began his career studying with Thomas Cole from 1844-46. Cole taught Church to be true to nature, even though he employed pen and paintbrush in allegorical ways to advocate for balance between the built and natural worlds. The profound connection between these two painters launched what would later be known as the Hudson River School and which extended to generations beyond their own, influencing art and attitudes about the natural world.

These expansive views show just how different the artistic goals of Cole and Church were from those of Heade, who greatly admired Cole and was a close friend and studio-mate of Church. While all three made use of contemporary natural science in order to understand their subject matter, Church and Cole sought to convey vast environments in a single canvas, while Heade zoomed in close, making iconoclastic hybrids of still life and landscape paintings that stand far outside the artistic mainstream, then as now.

Emily Cole and Isabel “Downie” Charlotte Church, Botanical Drawings

The practices and passions of these artists extended to the next generation, as seen in the careful renderings of botanicals by the artists’ daughters, Emily Cole and Isabel “Downie” Charlotte Church. We know from letters that Frederic Church was in dialogue with Cole’s daughter Emily about her artwork while she was in art school in New York City. Emily and Church’s daughter Isabel were lifelong friends who both made detailed studies and artworks depicting flora local to their homes in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Paula Hayes, T100

With The Gems, Heade was inspired by the symbiotic relationships he witnessed within nature. New scientific knowledge continues to change the way we understand ecological systems, and contemporary artists raise questions about how we interact within the environment. Rather than paint landscapes with oil on canvas, artist Paula Hayes creates living landscapes to examine the connection between human beings and Earth. Her handblown glass terrariums are small-scale living ecosystems that require daily tending, and are intended to provoke thought and action around our interactions with nature every day. Along with her crystal and plant works, Hayes worked with an ornithologist to create a new habitat for nesting birds which is also on view as part of the exhibition.

Jean Shin, Fallen

Another outdoor artwork at the show is Jean Shin’s Fallen, a site-specific installation that honors a grand hemlock that was planted by Frederic Church and died recently of natural causes. Shin went deep on the layers of associations bound up with this particular species, including the brutal destruction of millions of hemlocks by the 19th-century tanneries, which needed their bark to make leather, and the modern threat to hemlock survivors from the hemlock wooly adelgid insect. Working with a local community college class, she also identified and tagged the survivors within Olana’s 250 acres.

Portia Munson, Cardinal

Four monumental silk banners from Portia Munson’s series Memento Mori Mandalas show another mode of reflection on beauty and loss in the natural world. In works like Cardinal, she commemorates fallen creatures that have come in contact with man’s impact on the land, lofts them back into the trees, and lets them take flight once again.

Jeff Whetstone, Drawing E. Obsoleta

Questioning belonging in the natural world inspired Jeff Whetstone’s Drawing E. Obsoleta. In this work, the artist attempts to use the snake’s body to draw the landscape in which it lives, but the snake cannot be contained or controlled so neatly. Whetstone observes: “[There is the] notion of drawing being a hand that lays down a line, but in this case the line itself is actually guiding the hand.” Coming to art through study of biology, Whetstone is interested in what happens when you remove an animal, in this case a snake, from its home environment and, in this manner, probes the relationship between humans and nature.

Nick Cave, Soundsuit

Our exhibition returns again and again to flowers in/as art, and this dramatic object by artist Nick Cave is a prime example of the power of the floral form. Cave’s widely loved Soundsuits were inspired by the darkest of circumstances—as a reflection on the threats of Black identity amidst police violence—and produce unapologetically beautiful results. We like to think that the historic artists of our exhibition would have embraced this surprising juxtaposition as makers themselves of artworks that were once surprising and new.

Vik Muniz, Orchid and Three Brazilian Hummingbirds after Martin Johnson Heade

Vik Muniz’s work shows the extent to which the outsider work of Heade is still speaking to contemporary artists. Muniz, who is Brazilian, responds to a specific Heade canvas of a Brazilian subject, remaking the image with cut images from travel magazines that play with romantic ideas of the jungle. In some comments Muniz provided for our audio guide, he describes the extent to which Heade introduced him to a part of his own country that felt far removed from his own experience.

Lisa Sanditz and Emily Sartor, The Thrilling Tales and Startling Adventures

As part of the exhibition, we engaged two artists, Lisa Sanditz and Emily Sartor, who created The Thrilling Tales and Startling Adventures: An Unofficial Guide to Pollinators. It features pollinators, pollen makers, and habitats local to the environs of the Hudson River Skywalk region and brings our focus back to the habitats and landscapes made famous by Cole and Church.

Juan Fontanive, Detail from Ornithology Series

In his Ornithology series, Juan Fontanive uses Victorian clock motors and 18th- and 19th-century natural history illustrations to create flipbook animations of a bird in continuous flight. Bringing together history, scientific invention, and artistic imagination, these works reanimate the wonder of the hummingbirds that inspired Martin Johnson Heade a century earlier.

Cross Pollination was created by the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, The Olana Partnership at the Olana State Historic Site, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. It is curated by Kate Menconeri, Julia B. Rosenbaum, William L. Coleman, and Mindy N. Besaw. It is on display through Oct. 31, 2021. It features the following artists: Martin Johnson Heade, Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Emily Cole, Isabel Charlotte Church, Rachel Berwick, Nick Cave, Mark Dion, Richard Estes, Juan Fontanive, Jeffrey Gibson, Paula Hayes, Patrick Jacobs, Maya Lin, Flora C. Mace, Vik Muniz, Portia Munson, Lisa Sanditz, Emily Sartor, Sayler/Morris, Dana Sherwood, Jean Shin, Rachel Sussman, and Jeff Whetstone.