From the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries, we find in stained-glass installations stories of conflict, commemoration, devotion, and celebration. Virginia Chieffo Raguin is our guide through the cathedrals of Chartres, Canterbury, and Cologne as well as Paris’s Sainte-Chapelle, Swiss guildhalls, Iran’s Pink Mosque, Harvard Memorial Hall, Tiffany’s chapel for the World Exposition, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses.
Both in teaching and scholarship, Dr. Virginia Raguin is interested in religious art of all kinds, patterns of collecting and intersections of the visual image and written culture. Most recently, Raguin edited Art, Piety, and Destruction in the Christian West, 1500-1700, Ashgate, 2010. Raguin also worked with Sarah Stanbury, Department of English, and photographed East Anglian churches and guild halls to explore the physical context of medieval literary figures such as Julian of Norwich (Revelations) William Langland (Piers Plowman) Margery Kempe (The Book of Margery Kempe) and John Lydgate (poetry). Raguin has team-taught with many other professors at the College, in Music, History and Literature, and has been involved in both the Divine and the Natural World clusters of the Montserrat program.
Many of Raguin's publications focus on stained glass, both historic and modern, as in Stained Glass from its Origins to the Present with Abrams (USA) and Thames and Hudson (GB) in 2003. A member of the International Corpus Vitrearum, Raguin has co-authored Stained Glass before 1700 in the Midwest United States (Harvey Miller Press, London, 2002). Raguin also wrote the catalogue essay for Kiki Smith's exhibition in the Pace Gallery, New York: Kiki Smith: Lodestar, 2010. Raguin is currently working on Stained Glass before 1700 in California (vol. 1, Los Angeles). Stained Glass: Radiant Art, a richly illustrated guide to the collection of medieval and Renaissance stained glass in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, was published in 2013. From over 30 years of collaborative exchange with colleagues in 20 countries, Raguin has been deeply involved in questions of conservation and the commitment of maintaining historic sites as essential aspects of culture.
In addition to the lecture, Judson Studios president David Judson will take us on a tour of the fused glass facility and highlight their current projects in architectural glass.