Meiere Exhibition Organized by SBU's Quick Center Opens in D.C.

St. Bonaventure University’s Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts organized the first major exhibition of the work of 20th century art deco muralist and mosaicist Hildreth Meière, which opened at the Quick Center in 2009.

Now an expanded version of the show has traveled to the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., for an eight-month run. The exhibition, “Walls Speak: The Narrative Art of Hildreth Meière,” opened March 19 and runs through Nov. 27.

The exhibition at the Quick Center brought together in one exhibition, for the first time, the sketches, studies in gouache, full-scale cartoons and models of the work of Meière, who created pieces for churches, government and commercial buildings, world’s fairs, restaurants and cocktail lounges, and even ocean liners in a career that spanned five decades.

Meière designed mosaics and murals for buildings as prominent as Radio City Music Hall in New York and the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln. She had more than 100 major commissions from leading architects for projects throughout the United States before dying from leukemia in 1961. She was one of the country’s most gifted architectural embellishers and an important figure in the history of American liturgical art.

The National Building Museum exhibition, according to a featured piece in The Washington Post, “gives a qualified assent to Meière’s modernism. Yes, she created art that harmonizes with the streamlined forms of Art Deco structures. But the exhibition reveals three principal things about the New York artist: She was detail-oriented, versatile and something of a classicist.

“Along with commercial and government edifices, Meière worked on numerous churches, cathedrals and synagogues. Many of these have a Hellenistic flavor, suggesting a 20th-century update of imagery you might see in ancient landmarks of Greece or Turkey.”

The exhibition includes discoveries made since its opening at St. Bonaventure’s Quick Center in 2009, according to an article in the New York Times. It notes: “Two years ago a box of drawings by Meière, up to 10 feet long and depicting 1930s mosaic spider webs at 1 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, turned up in the archives of the New York architecture firm HLW International. Three have been added to the 2009 show, along with tools used to install her mosaics.”

The Quick Center is proud to play a role in what could be called a rediscovery of an artist who, in her lifetime, was considered the most famous, distinguished and prolific art deco muralist in the country, one of America’s leading practitioners of the art of mosaic, and one of the country’s most gifted architectural embellishers, said Joseph A. LoSchiavo, executive director of the Quick Center.

“For the better part of my adult life, Hildreth Meière has been like one of those neighbors we greet regularly but whom we don’t get to know very well or whose name we somehow fail to learn. And then suddenly, one revelatory day, we realize that a person we’ve taken for granted has had an impact on the world around us beyond our imagining,” said LoSchiavo.