How I Came to Know Hildreth Meière

Prior to May 2005, I had no idea who Hildreth Meière was.  In fact, I don’t recall ever hearing her name. That all changed when I attended the 8^th World Congress on Art Deco in New York City.

The Art Deco Society of New York, headed at the time by Kathryn Hausman, organized an outstanding conference with a great roster of speakers, including Meière’s daughter Louise Meière Dunn, who spoke about her mother’s life and work. I was mesmerized! I wanted to learn more about Meière, perhaps write an article about her. But only weeks after the World Congress, Bob Bruegmann, a well-respected architectural historian and one of my former graduate school professors, invited me to become involved in a book about the late Chicago modernist architect Harry Weese. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to learn and write about Weese (a talented architect and complex personality once known internationally but largely forgotten in the years following his death in 1998) and to work with Bob. So Meière was placed on the shelf.

Four years later, the research and writing for the Weese book was essentially complete and the book was in production. And at that same time, longtime editor of the Chicago Art Deco Society (CADS) Magazine, Kristan McKinsey, was stepping down. When CADS President Joe Loundy asked me to take over as editor, I decided that my first issue would feature an article about Meière and her work in Chicago.

I was delighted to discover that Meière now had a website, www.hildrethmeiere.com, maintained by the International Hildreth Meière Association, an organization established by Meière’s family to preserve her legacy. I sent an inquiry asking where Meière’s archival materials were held. In the message, I explained that I had first learned about Meière at the World Congress, put her aside to work on the Weese book, and now, as editor of CADS Magazine, wanted to feature her in my inaugural issue. 

I received a reply from Louise Dunn, who told me that the Meière papers were housed in New York (since moved to Washington, D.C.) at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. A few days later I received a phone call from Catherine Coleman Brawer who was curating an exhibition about Meière, Walls Speak: The Narrative Art of Hildreth Meière, scheduled to open in September 2009 at the Regina A. Quck Center for the Arts of St. Bonaventure University in Olean, New York.  Louise had given her my name because we had two things in common—first, we were both interested in Meière, and second, Catherine had once worked at the Elvehjem Art Center (now the Chazen Museum of Art) at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which was designed by Harry Weese! 

I met Catherine when I went to New York to cull through the Meière archive for the article. We continued to share our experiences learning about Meière and eventually the idea of a book evolved . . . and evolved . . . and evolved . . . and finally became The Art Deco Murals of Hildreth Meière.