Shining some light on the McBean window

Prior to its installation, The Gift was on display on the floor of the Cathedral.

The Gift, the final stained glass window to be installed in Grace Cathedral, was commissioned and produced through the generosity of the McBean Family Foundation in memory of Peter McBean, a longtime cathedral trustee and noted San Francisco philanthropist who died in 1997.

The window project was a rare opportunity for a contemporary artist to create a permanent work of public art within the centuries old traditions of a cathedral building.

"My entire career has been dedicated to exploring the relationships between glass and painting," says world renowned glass artist Narcissus Quagliata. "It was an honor to win the competition to do the last window of Grace Cathedral. Because I felt that my career doing artwork in glass had taken me to so many places in the world, but in San Francisco where I had really studied art--at the San Francisco Art Institute, I did not have any major piece here. And what better place than to do a new work for Grace Cathedral, the spiritual center of gravity for the entire city."

Allen Dragge, of Reflection Studios, became involved in the project because of his previous work restoring the existing stained glass windows in the Cathedral. "We were included from the very beginning on the assessment committee and heard initial presentations from ten different artists," says Dragge.

From that group, the design by Quagliata was chosen. "Narcissus was responsible entirely for the artistic development of the piece, the colors and the form," Dragge explains. "[Reflection Studios] worked in collaboration with him in terms of structural execution, how to divide the piece, how to support it, what the steel frame would look like, and how to protect it from the outside."

The Gift was constructed over four weeks in the spring of 2001 at the Bullseye Glass Company in Portland, Oregon--and another four weeks at Reflection Studios, with two artists from Reflection Studios and oversight from Quagliata and Dragge. A portable easel was constructed so that the pieces could be assembled as they were being fused together. It has five main body pieces, which was the minimum number of divisions they could make and still have a structurally sound window. The area of the window is 120 square feet, and weighs in at 1275 pounds. The completed window, including protective glass and metal frame, weighed close to 3000 pounds. "The largest pane of glass, might weigh 250 pounds. That’s the limit of what a couple of people could lift," describes Dragge. "We wanted to make it as big as we could safely handle."

The construction of the window is entirely novel. Layers of sheet glass were fused at 1200 degrees Fahrenheit in a large flat kiln on railroad tracks. The bed rolled out from the lid of the kiln and sheets of eight-inch thick glass were bonded together in the heat. From there, layers of glass frit, finely ground glass with the consistency of sand or sugar, were applied by hand with sifters and strainers layer by layer, to build the density of the colors—similar to the construction of a Navajo sand painting. Quagliata calls this technique light painting. "It had to be dark enough to hold strong daylight," Dragge elaborates, "and still be illuminated on overcast days."

In addition to its remarkable construction, there are unique details in the window. Two lenses were prepared by Prof. Salvador Cuevas, Ph.D. at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. These lenses were then set into the window: one in a beveled joint between two sections of glass and given an orange filter; the other glued onto a clear spot on the sheet glass base and given a rose-tinted filter. These lenses focus the light into clearly defined areas of light which dance in the larger orange glow cast by the window. (You can see the orange circle, representing The Sun, move down the wall halfway through the time-lapse footage above.)

Around the central image in the window is a nimbus of clear glass. This "curved prism" was used in the oculus of a previous window by Quagliata, at the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome. The effect of this element of the window is the jagged rainbow light sculpture that is projected on the opposite walls of the North Transept during the hours that the window receives direct light.

While gathering information on the window, Dragge and Quagliata calculated its position in the cathedral, its dimensions, and its latitude and longitude. It was determined that the window would receive the straightest beam of light during the hours after sunrise around the summer solstice, and this is what can be seen in the time-lapse video above.

Quagliata describes the meaning and imagery of the window this way:
"The Gift" was the name I gave the work, in my mind it refers to the miracle of the gift of life. But Dean Alan Jones also gave it another name in an interview , "Our Lady of the Cosmos", I like both.

I also wanted to point out that while all the magnificent windows of Grace Cathedral are masculine and complex, multifaceted stained glass, in contrast I wanted to present an image that is feminine and simple.

The image is extremly simple. The only shape is one of a Madonna, a silhouette, inside of that silhouette floats a galaxy, our home. Perhaps I want to remind us that our entire universe is our home, and that the miracle of life itself is woven in the very fabric of our entire cosmos.

The Gift, assembled on an easel at Bullseye Glass.

"The Sun" lens in the lower right corner of the window.