Addendum Text Panel: Clara Driscoll (1861-1944)
8 x 11 paper with black text, clear tape

Polishing the Glass Ceiling
Durational performance
Preston Bradley Hall, 3rd Floor South
Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago IL
2021

Polishing the Glass Ceiling is a durational performance set in the Chicago Cultural Center. For three hours I burnished favrile glass and marble mosaics with my grandmother’s cotton handkerchief. Beginning on hands and knees, I silently buffed the floor and walls of the staircase and cleaned the entrance hall floor, working my way into Preston Bradley Hall. Standing on my toes under the translucent ceiling I polished the walls as high as I could reach. Combining repetitive domestic actions with impossible physical tasks, I aimed to make visible the challenges faced by women working for the Tiffany Glass Decorating Company during the construction of this building.

This largest of Louis Comfort Tiffany art glass domes was designed by J. A. Holtzer. Mostly anonymous craftswomen in Tiffany’s Women’s Glass Cutting Department fabricated 30,000 individual glass panels in fish scale-shaped pieces. They also created more than 10,000 square feet of glass and mother of pearl mosaics for the upper walls. Scholarship in the early 2000’s identified some of these “Tiffany Girls” including Clara Driscoll (1861 - 1944), manager of the Women’s Glass Cutting Division. Driscoll was responsible for the design of several of the company’s most popular lamps including the daffodil and dragonfly motifs. When she married she was required to leave the firm.

At the culmination of the performance I read aloud the names of thirty female authors, adding them into the space where the names of thirty canonical male author are inscribed on the walls of this former public library. Before leaving the building I taped an updated entrance label onto the existing panel to include labor statistics and specific resources about Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Company of New York.