Celebrating Women Artists for Women’s History Month

Head on over to our Bloomberg Connects app to explore the contributions of female artists to the dazzling art here at the Cathedral.

This month we’re highlighting the cadre of female artists who contributed art and beauty to the Cathedral — many of them who have never gotten their proper due.

(The app is available in all app stores, and you can find a direct link here).

Included in the online gallery are sculptors Marian Brackenridge, Hazel May Clere, Laura Gardin Fraser and Mary Austin Aldrich Fraser; stained-glass artists Marguerite Gaudin, Federica Hastings Fields and Evie Hone; and Art Deco muralist Hildreth Meiere.

Here’s a sampling, about Gaudin:

Marguerite Gaudin (1909–1991) served as the primary artist for Willet [stained glass] Studio from 1931 until her death in 1991, working closely with Henry Lee Willet. Over her 60-year career she designed windows that can be viewed in more than 1,000 churches and secular buildings, in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five foreign countries. One of the largest projects was creating the design for the glass panels for 30,000 square feet of walls in the Hall of Science at the 1964-1965 World’s Fair in New York. Because of the influence and popularity of her designs, Willet Studios trained another designer and numerous glass painters in that style, in order to be able to repair these windows in the future.

She had a wry sense of humor often introducing unusual but related themes into serious religious windows. One is a vignette in a large window dedicated to Music of Schroeder, Charles Schulz’s Beethoven-obsessed Peanuts character, playing his toy piano next to Bach and Ralph Vaughn Williams.

For the Cathedral, she designed the two Prayers for All Conditions of Men windows in the north arcade (1957), and a small window in the north transept representing Jesus Christ as the Good Shepherd (1948).