Once a prison housing notorious criminals such as Al Capone, the Eastern State Penitentiary is now a historic haunt open to the public. The building was the first penitentiary in the world, a type of spiritual jail meant to rouse regret in its prisoners. This might sound like an unusual place to open an art exhibition – but for Judith Schaechter, a more perfect location for her latest show, “The Battle of Carnival and Lent,” could not have been imagined. Schaechter, intrigued by the penitentiary’s intersection between penitent salvation and confined solitude, has created 17 stained glass windows that will be installed in the skylights within Cellblocks 8, 11, and 14.
In Schaechter’s words on the project’s website, her exhibition muses “in a non-religious way [on] the psychological border territory between ‘spiritual aspiration’ and human suffering.” The exhibit will open April 1st and close November 30th. An opening reception will take place May 11th from 5:30-7:30PM.
For many years, Schaechter has repeatedly been questioned her ideal architectural setting. Her answer has never altered: the Eastern State Penitentiary. Philadelphia, the penitentiary’s location, is her hometown, which explains her connection to the city’s landmarks. Perhaps even more importantly, the duality of a building as both a prison for punishment and a chapel for redemption, with its grand architecture and vaulted skylights, forever called out to her for stained glass. As Schaechter says in an e-mail correspondence with the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet, “I can’t recall ever being there on a visit without imagining installing there!”
Around half of Schaechter’s windows at the exhibition are throwbacks to traditional cathedral windows of the 12th and 13th century, such as those found at Chatres. Schaechter describes these windows as “strictly ornamental,” a nod to “the great strength” of their historic predecessors. The other half depict incarcerated figures. Schaechter has had a “lifelong reluctance” to crop or compress figures, as such an approach felt to her “truly violent.” Squishing these figures into their frames, however, is the perfect way to capitalize on the experiences of imprisonment.
The title of the exhibition is also the name of one of the show’s individual windows and is based upon Pieter Brugel’s famous painting of the same name. Schaechter says she has always longed to create her own rendition of Brugel’s “The Battle of Carnival and Lent” and that the penitentiary’s theme of “angel and devil” seemed to fit this perfectly. “It seemed to me that any person struggling with an angel on one shoulder and devil on the other is one who has known incarceration, whether it be physical or psychological,” says Schaechter.
And that is at the heart of Schaechter’s exhibition: imprisonment, penitence, isolation, redemption – these are not merely the experiences of the penitentiary’s bygone prisoners. These are experiences that are universal. “It has been my experience that my work appeals to those who are in transition,” says Schaechter on the project’s website. “My audience is, to some extent, those who occupied the cells as well as the current visitors who may identify with such a struggle.”
A close up look at one of Schaechter’s 17 stained glass windows. photo: judith schaechter.
When asked to expand on thoughts regarding such a transition, Schaechter elaborates that transformation “seems a necessary condition to call something art.” She references Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St. Denis, a prominent figure of the 12th century, a man who said that stained glass was “enlightenment embodied.” The light of stained glass could bring life to a room, awakening its viewers in a way that other mediums could not, leaving them forever changed afterwards by their momentary transcendence.
“We respond to light physically—we need it, it sustains us in a way that oil paint, marble or video, say, cannot claim,” Schaechter confides in her correspondence with GLASS. “The sun is the source of all things. This is something we share with plants and animals, so it’s hardly got intellectual bullet-proofing. Thus, the downside is that it can be glitzy and stupid when its all surface… and no substance.”
Glass thus contains an inherent promise to alter and nourish those who view it. Such is the transformative experience Schaechter hopes people walk away with after observing her newest project. “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent” asks us to realize that transformation and transgression are not always ethereal, religious acts. They can also be simple, earthly ones, reached through glass works created by and for the human eye.
— Anna Tatelman
IF YOU GO:
“The Battle of Carnival and Lent“April 1st – November 30th, 2012Eastern State PenitentiaryCellblocks 8, 11, and 14 2027 Fairmount AvenuePhiladelphia, PA 19130
Phone: (215) 236-3300