Art Deco Gems: Hildreth’s Meière’s Glass Work from Wall Street to the Altar

The mural painter and architectural decorator Hildreth Meière (1892-1961), renowned for approximately 100 major commissions across the United States, worked in metal, marble, terra cotta, oil on canvas, and glass, among other materials. On February 9, her great-granddaughter Anna Kupik, a board member of the International Hildreth Meière Association (IHMA), will lecture for the Art Glass Forum | New York about how Meière incorporated glass mosaic and stained glass into spectacular spaces for worship, work, and entertainment.

Meière’s Manhattan studio was a rare example of a woman-led company shaping building facades and interiors, in collaboration with architects as eminent as Bertram Goodhue and Ralph Walker. Her designs in glass ranged from narrative to abstract and geometric, with inspirations including Byzantine churches and Art Deco.

Kupik will explore commercial installations such as One Wall Street, the Hotel McAlpin’s cocktail lounge, and the AT&T Long Distance Building in Manhattan and the 1939 New York World’s Fair grounds in Queens. Among Meière’s religious commissions are Temple Emanu-El and St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York and sanctuaries in Detroit (St. Aloysius), St. Louis (Cathedral Basilica), and Washington, D.C. (National Cathedral). Meière worked with fabricators at the Rambusch Decorating Company, Ravenna Mosaic Company, and Germany’s Puhl & Wagner to execute her ambitious plans.

The lecture will shed light on an innovator’s working methods and artistic process in glass, one of numerous unforgiving mediums that Meière mastered.

The not-for-profit International Hildreth Meière Association (IHMA), founded in 2005, supports activities through education and preservation to promote and perpetuate the legacy of Hildreth Meière. Its website, hildrethmeiere.org, offers comprehensive biographical material and analysis of her works, extant as well as lost.

The Art Glass Forum, a nonprofit founded in 2000, supports scholarship about glass, from ancient shards to contemporary experiments. For further details: artglassforumny.org.

IMAGES:

Right: Drinking deer mosaic on north wall, Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, Missouri, by Hildreth Meière, 1958 . Photo by Hildreth Meière Dunn.

Center: Hildreth Meière (1892-1961)

Left: Peacock mosaic on stringcourse, St. Bartholomew's Church, New York, by Hildreth Meière, 1929 . Photo by Hildreth Meière Dunn.