Collection: Guests of Honor: Frederic Church’s Cotopaxi

Detroit Institute of Arts

March 27 - October 25, 2026

To mark the 200th anniversary of Frederic Church’s birth, the Detroit Institute of Arts presents Guests of Honor: Frederic Church’s Cotopaxi, an exhibition highlighting the artist’s dramatic 1862 painting of an erupting South American volcano. One of the DIA’s most celebrated and beloved American paintings, Cotopaxi appears together with three of Church’s oil studies of Cotopaxi and a related landscape by his contemporary Louis Remy Mignot.

The 10th installment in the DIA’s Guests of Honor series, which brings single or small groups of extraordinary works from across the globe to Detroit, Frederic Church’s Cotopaxi features loans from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Like many of his contemporaries, Church was fascinated by the emerging science of geology that suggested the earth was both older than previously believed and always changing—a fact evidenced by the eruption of volcanoes. Eager to see these forces of nature, Church traveled to Colombia and Ecuador in 1853 and 1857 and used sketches completed there to create the DIA’s great Cotapaxi, the first of his works to show a violent volcanic eruption.