Artist: Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961)
Title: Fairies and Woodland Scenes
Date: c. 1932
Medium: 2-panel oil on canvas
Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961) painted this two-panel mural along a main corridor of the original Armstrong Elementary School. Griffin was only the second female student to attend the School of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston and was the first woman licensed as an architect in the United States. In 1895, she returned to her native Chicago and within a year was working in Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio where she eventually became a senior designer and lead draftsman. Under Wright’s employ, Marion Mahony met fellow architect Walter Burley Griffin (1876-1937), whom she married in 1911. The Griffins moved to Australia in 1914 when Walter won the competition for the design of Canberra, a new capital for Australia.
During a lengthy visit with her family back in Chicago in the early 1930s, Griffin made the murals at Armstrong, where her sister was art teacher. Fairies and Woodland Scenes is an expression of the artist’s belief in the existence of fairies in everyday life. In her unpublished autobiography Magic in America, Griffin wrote that fairies existed as helpers to humans and that teaching children to believe in fairies would expand their creativity and imagination. On the left side of the mural, a group of fairies feeds a nest of young herons. On the right, another set of fairies assists the male heron in securing food for his young. Griffin’s feathery strokes and precise details are reminiscent of her famous architectural renderings, made for Wright and for her husband’s winning entry in the Canberra competition.
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Click below to see excerpts from a play inspired by the mural performed by Armstrong students.
Produced by art teacher Rain (Patricia Gianneschi-McNichols) of Armstrong School and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Helpful Tips for viewing this Quicktime movie.
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Related work in the Art Institute:
Frank Lloyd Wright,Window Triptych from the Avery Coonley Playhouse, Riverside, Illinois
Prairie Style architect Frank Lloyd Wright used stained glass in homes to decorate them and to bring the outside indoors.
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