Programs + Events

A continuing series of courses at OLANA that embraces the Creative Aging movement, teaching skills while creating art, for adults 55+

Experience Olana’s Main House through the eyes and interpretation of an architect, curated by Susan Wides, Director and Curator of Steven Holl’s ‘T’ Space.

Six contemporary artists will lead performances and conversations along Olana’s historic carriage roads, examining practice and place through disciplines in photography, music, dance, and film.

Master storyteller Tom Lee uses art, objects, history and interactivity to help young people (and grown-ups!) fall in love with museums. This is a program designed to introduce youth to the magic of a historic house museum.

Poet Celia Bland and art historian Susan Merriam, faculty at Bard College, will put the gorgeous panoramas glimpsed from Olana’s carriage roads in dialogue with some of the unexpected perspectives of contemporary and Romantic poetry.

Take a tour of Olana’s geological landscape with Hartwick College Geology Professor, Robert Titus. Participants will learn about the geological history of Olana and the forces that shaped the 19th-century Hudson River School artist Frederic Church’s artist-designed landscape.

Join author and storyteller Pamela Schmebri for a ghost story walk along Olana’s carriage roads inspired by historic gothic and Victorian era literature, folklore, and Halloween traditions.

Join artist Geoffrey Leckie along Frederic Church’s carriage roads seeing Olana the place and the Hudson River views through a painter’s eye. Leckie is an explorer enamored by the natural effects of light, shadow and atmosphere in the natural world and is a frequent plein air painter.

Brothers Will and Sam Skarstad offer an immersive music-as-place experience composed for Frederic Church’s artist-designed landscape. Staged for Olana’s Ridge Road, this mobile concert will follow along the historic carriage ways with expansive panoramic views incorporated into the performance; not as a backdrop but a fully integrated element.