Happening

Introduce your preschoolers to art experiences. Children will focus on one artwork, read a related story picture book and create an art project with their adult companion. A fun and engaging way for young children to enjoy 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.

Ekphrastic: a literary response to a work of visual art. Join Woodmere and Wild Indigo Poetry for an afternoon celebrating the connections between visual art, poetry, and music. Inspired by the vibrant artwork of Moe Brooker, participants will explore the galleries and take part in an ekphrastic poetry-writing workshop led by acclaimed poets Raina J. León and Kirwyn Sutherland. The workshops will be followed by an open mic in the galleries, with music by Miles Orion Butler and Karen Smith. The afternoon will conclude with light refreshments on Woodmere’s porch. Writers of all experience levels are welcome. Advance registration is required.

Discover how daily spiritual practice, improvisation, and Black Church culture shaped the art of Moe Brooker. Join Dr. Crystal J. Lucky for an exploration of the artist’s vibrant visual language, considering how his everyday reverence for God found expression through paint. Drawing connections among Black Gospel music, Brooker’s Philadelphia roots, and his artistic influences, Lucky will illuminate the relationship between faith and creative experimentation in his work. Dr. Crystal J. Lucky is Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at Villanova University. Her teaching focuses on African American literature, including the Harlem Renaissance and the works of Toni Morrison and August Wilson. She is also a gospel singer and pastor in the Philadelphia area.