Frederic Church in Jamaica at Cooper Hewitt, Upper East Side, NYC

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum on the Upper East Side opens "Frederic Church in Jamaica" on Friday, October 30. It runs through Monday, February 15, 2027. The show gathers more than 60 oil studies and graphite sketches that the American landscape painter (1826–1900) made on the island in 1865. It is part of the global celebrations of the 200th anniversary of his birth. The museum holds more than 2,000 of Church's oil studies and sketches, the largest collection of his work anywhere.

Church is known for monumental, highly detailed landscape paintings, and he travelled widely in search of subjects. His April 1865 trip to Jamaica with his wife, Isabel, was different. They went looking for emotional and spiritual refuge after their two young children died of diphtheria. For five months he went out daily on foot and on horseback, recording the island's terrain and plants and the way light and weather shifted.

The works on view range from sketches done in moments to studies that took hours. They show him trying to capture light, colour and form accurately, as well as how a place felt. His pencil sketches often carry short notes that are both informative and poetic. Curator Caitlin Condell says the oil studies and plein-air sketches have rarely, if ever, been shown publicly.

The exhibition also places the drawings within Jamaica's colonial history, when Black Jamaicans lived in extreme poverty under British rule. It brings in the voices of Black Jamaicans such as Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, who addressed the political tensions of the time. Reproductions of period photographs, some collected by Church and some from the National Library of Jamaica, appear alongside rare books from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

Public programs include an illustrated lecture on Thursday, November 12 by Victoria Johnson, author of the 2026 Church biography "Glorious Country." The Smithsonian's botanical illustrator, Alice Tangerini, will lead a hands-on workshop on drawing Jamaican flora. In 2027 the museum will also launch an online platform with new photography and scholarship on its Church drawings.

The show is organized by Condell with collections assistant Mackenzie Jones, and is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, with additional funders. The museum is at 2 East 91st Street.

(Details are drawn from points that agree across reports by The City Life, Van Nuys News Press.)