Lecture Exhibition
Signature Series: Tiffany Memorials – The Visual Language of Remembrance
Saturday and Sunday, February 22 and 23 Saturday, 2 - 4 pm and Sunday, 2 - 3 pm Buy Tickets Adults: $45 Members: $35 Students: $25 (Includes admission for both events)
Saturday, February 22, 2 - 4 p.m. (reception with drinks and light hors d’oeuvres following)
at the Driehaus Museum, Chicago
Sunday, February 23, 2 - 3 p.m. (doors open at 1 p.m.)
at Levere Memorial Temple, 1856 Sheridan Road, Evanston
This Signature Series is presented in conjunction with the Museum’s current exhibition Eternal Light: The Sacred Stained-Glass Windows of Louis Comfort Tiffany. The two-day event offers a rare opportunity to hear from three world-renowned experts who will expand on the role the Tiffany firms played in creating a culture and ethos of commemoration in the United States and focuses on the development of war memorials in this country and throughout Europe.
Dr. Jay M. Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University will frame this discussion around the vital importance of war memorials and the desire and need to memorialize, remember, and heal. Dr. Winter is widely regarded as one of the foremost cultural historians of the First World War’s impact on Europe and a major contributor to the history of memory,
Leading expert on the Civil War in historical memory and recipient of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, Dr. David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, will contextualize memorialization in American society after the Civil War and during the age of Tiffany Studios.
Curator and leading Tiffany scholar Dr. Patricia C. Pongracz, Executive Director of Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, will examine how the Tiffany firms, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were at the forefront of establishing appropriate ways to commemorate war and the loss of life in war through their ecclesiastical and memorial commissions.
Saturday will be spent in discussion at the Museum with reception following; Sunday provides an extraordinary opportunity to explore one of Tiffany’s most remarkable war memorial commissions, the Levere Memorial Temple in Evanston, with Jay Winter and Patricia Pongracz. Levere Memorial Temple is easily accessible via the CTA Purple Line.
Dr. David W. Blight
David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He previously taught at North Central College in Illinois, at Harvard University, and at Amherst College. In October of 2018, Simon and Schuster published his new biography of Frederick Douglass, entitled, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which garnered nine book awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Blight is also the author of Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989); Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), which was awarded multiple book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Merle Curti Award, the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize; A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation (2008), which won the Connecticut book award for best book in non-fiction; and American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011), which won the Aniston-Wolf Prize in non-fiction for best book on race and racism. He has edited some six books, including editions of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom; W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk; and Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro. Blight is featured in many documentary films on American history on PBS, the BBC, and other networks. He wrote one of the chapters for the book, To Dream A World Anew: A History of the African American People, a companion volume for the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2012, Blight was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Blight has always been a teacher first. At the beginning of his career, he spent seven years as a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. He was an undergraduate at Michigan State University and did his Ph. D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Blight maintains a website, including information about public lectures and books, at davidwblight.com.
Dr. Patricia C. Pongracz
Patricia C. Pongracz is the Executive Director of Macculloch Hall Historical Museum (MHHM) in Morristown, New Jersey, a position she has held since 2015. Prior to arriving at MHHM, she researched Tiffany Studios’ interiors designed for American synagogues from 1889 through 1930 as the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in The American Wing during the 2014/2015 academic year. Previously, Pongracz was affiliated for fourteen years with the Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA) in New York City, where she was the museum’s Acting Director and Director of Curatorial affairs until June 2013. Pongracz co-curated a number of exhibitions at MOBIA and co-authored and co-edited numerous publications, including Louis C. Tiffany and the Art of Devotion, Perspectives on Medieval Art: Learning through Looking, and Biblical Art and the Asian Imagination. Pongracz received her M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University, Providence, RI, and was a recipient of multiple grants and awards, including those from the Corning Museum of Glass and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Her research on a selection of Tiffany Studios Interiors was most recently published in The Metropolitan Museum Journal (volume 51, 2017).
Dr. Jay M. Winter
Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. He is a specialist on World War I and its impact on the 20th century. Previously, Winter taught at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Warwick, the University of Cambridge, and Columbia University. In 2001, he joined the faculty of Yale. Winter is the author or co-author of 25 books, including Socialism and the Challenge of War; Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912-18; Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History; The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century; Rene Cassin and the rights of man, and most recently, War beyond words: Languages of remembrance from the Great War to the present. In addition, he has edited or co-edited 30 books and contributed 130 book chapters to edited volumes. Winter was also co-producer, co-writer, and chief historian for the PBS/BBC series The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, which won an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award and a Producers Guild of America Award for best television documentary in 1997. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Graz, the University of Leuven, and the University of Paris.
This Signature Series event is presented by Bulley and Andrews
Eternal Light: The Sacred Stained-Glass Windows of Louis Comfort Tiffany is presented by Northern Trust with major support provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional support is provided by William and Irene Beck and the Richard H. Driehaus Annual Exhibition Fund.
Sunday’s program is presented in partnership with Levere Memorial Temple and the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Foundation
Images Left to Right: African American Civil War Memorial, photograph courtesy of the National Park Service. Levere Memorial Temple, photograph courtesy of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Foundation. Ossuaire de Douaumon, photograph by Paul M.R. Maeyaert.
Ticket Refund Policy
Tickets are fully refundable up to 72 hours prior to the event.
Member Discount
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Use of Photography
Please note that in exchange for your reservation and/or ticket, you have authorized the Driehaus Museum to photograph, record, film, video tape, or otherwise use your likeness, performance, image, and/or voice for use in general and/or program-related Driehaus Museum promotional materials. If for any reason, you do not wish to be photographed, please provide your name(s) at check-in on the day of the event.