TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL MEETING
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, 3-4 JUNE 2023
EVANSTON & CRYSTAL LAKE, ILLINOIS
The next Griffin meeting is scheduled for the weekend of 3-4 June 2023 in Evanston, Illinois with optional visits to nearby Rogers Park and more distant Crystal Lake. The regular Saturday meeting will contain a morning session of lectures and an afternoon of house tours. Lecturers include historic masonry preservation engineer Brett Laureys, preservationist/historian Susan Benjamin, Chicago’s cultural historian Tim Samuelson, and architectural historian Paul Kruty. On the tour will be houses by Griffin, Wright, Dwight Perkins, Lawrence Perkins, and Myron Hunt. Two optional visits are being added: a Sunday morning trip to the ancestral home of the American Terra Cotta Company in Crystal Lake, Illinois; and a Friday afternoon visit to the Armstrong School in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood for a viewing of Marion Mahony Griffin’s 1930 Fairy mural (see below for details of both events).
Doors at the auditorium of the Block Museum will open at 8:00AM, with the program beginning at 9:00. As usual, we will have a coffee break after the second speaker and plan to end by noon, when boxed lunches will be available for those who order on the enclosed registration form. Afternoon tours will take place between 1:00 and 4:30. The Block Museum of Art is on the campus of Northwestern University at 40 Arts Circle Drive. There is parking nearby at the South Campus Parking Garage, 1847 Campus Drive.
NOTE! TWO MEETING ADD-ONS:
MURAL AND TERRA COTTA
We have arranged for registered Griffin Society members to see Marion Mahony Griffin’s mural in the Armstrong Elementary School, now the George B. Armstrong International Studies Elementary School, at 2110 Greenleaf Ave., Chicago. The school will be open Friday afternoon, June 2nd, from 3:30 to 5:00, the only time available to us. The school wishes us to supply a list of visitors. Because this event will take place before the Saturday morning conference registration at the Block Museum, you will need to check the box on the enclosed registration form so that we can produce such a list, and then identify yourself at the door. This sixteen-foot mural, titled “Fairies Feeding the Herons,” was painted by MMG in 1930 during her second return visit to the States after the Griffins’ 1914 move to Australia. At the time she was staying nearby at her sister’s home at Damen and Estes in Rogers Park.
Sunday’s excursion will be to the American Terra Cotta Museum at 3703 South Route 31, Crystal Lake, Illinois, 60012. The collection is housed in the World Headquarters Building of TC Industries, Inc., at the corner of Route 31 and Half Mile Road. The American Terra Cotta Company was one of the leading producers of decorative terra cotta during the first half of the 20th Century, producing many of Louis Sullivan’s most famous designs, and also issued Teco pottery, the so-called “Art Pottery of the Prairie School.”
The Annual Meeting Registration form can be found here (Annual Meeting Registration Form). Please return the form with your payment to the Society.
MEMBERSHIP RENEWALS
Once again, please renew your Griffin Society membership for 2023. Again, we have not raised our basic dues of $25 over the life of the organization and yet have been able to host the meetings and newsletters as well as sponsor publications and preservation projects. But we do need our members to renew to continue making these things possible. Thanks so very much. The membership renewal form can be found here (Membership Form). Please return the form with your payment to the Society. |
