Tiffany in the Wild: Capturing Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Living Art

Last November, I stood in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mesmerized by a Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass window. It glowed like a captured butterfly—radiant, but stilled, no longer dancing with the sunlight it was born to catch. At the unveiling, expert Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen spoke of its craftsmanship, and I felt a mix of awe and a quiet ache. Museums like the Met, the Morse Museum in Orlando, and the Haworth Art Gallery in England do irreplaceable work, safeguarding Tiffany’s genius for generations. Their care ensures these fragile masterpieces endure, protected from time and neglect. Yet, as I stood there, I couldn’t shake the sense that something was missing—something alive, something wild. These windows were meant to breathe in their original settings, shaping spaces and human moments. That moment sparked a dream: a documentary to chase Tiffany’s art where it still lives, in its natural habitat, before it’s lost forever.

Development presentation

Beyond the Museum’s Frame

Museums are heroes of preservation, meticulously conserving Tiffany’s glass so we can marvel at its beauty. But in their pristine galleries, the windows lose their pulse. Tiffany didn’t craft these pieces for static display—they were designed to transform light, to color sacred rituals, to weave beauty into everyday life. What if we could capture them as they were meant to be? Not as artifacts, but as living art, still embedded in the architecture and stories they were created for?

This is the heart of “Tiffany in the Wild,” a documentary vision—one we hope to bring to life if we can raise the funds for such an ambitious journey. It’s a race to find and film Tiffany’s surviving works in their original settings, where they still catch morning light, frame grief, or surprise passersby. These windows and mosaics aren’t just art; they’re experiences, and they’re vanishing. Urban sprawl, decay, or “restoration” efforts often pull these works from their homes, leaving future generations with only museum echoes of Tiffany’s vision. We want to capture them before they’re gone.

Tiffany’s Living Canvas

Imagine Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where Tiffany’s windows glow in quiet mausoleums. These aren’t for art critics—they’re for mourners, turning cold stone into warm, sacred spaces. Each window feels intimate, like a whispered comfort in the face of loss. Picture a camera lingering there at dusk, capturing the colors as they shift, blending light and grief into something eternal.

Or step into the Curtis Publishing Building in Philadelphia, where Dream Garden, a massive mosaic designed by by Maxfield Frederick Parrish (1870 - 1966), and executed by Tiffany, guards the lobby. Over 100,000 glass pieces in more than 260 color tones catch the chaos of city light—street lamps, sunlight, neon. Employees and strangers pass by it daily, some barely noticing, while others pause to let its beauty sink in. What does it do to you, walking past a genius every day? Does it sharpen your senses, make you expect more from the world? A documentary could frame those fleeting glances, showing the mosaic’s quiet power in a bustling urban scene.

Then there’s the Church of the Covenant in Boston, a complete Tiffany interior from 1884, still alive on Newbury Street. Its windows don’t just decorate—they shape worship, their colors deepening with New England’s seasons. Unlike a museum’s still display, these windows ask you to sit with them, to feel the light move. They echo medieval cathedrals, where stained glass told stories as your eyes adjusted to the dark. A camera could trace that slow reveal, tying past to present in a quiet sanctuary.

Pratt Institute Library, exterior

Pratt Institute Library, interior

Pratt Institute Library, interior

At the Pratt Institute Library in Brooklyn, Tiffany’s vision goes beyond windows. Built in 1896, this free public library wraps visitors in stone mosaics and Sienna marble columns. It’s an environment that shapes how students think and dream. Imagine filming young artists sketching in that space, their ideas sparked by Tiffany’s belief that beauty belongs in daily life, not locked away for the elite.

And in places like Old Blandford Church in Virginia or First Presbyterian in Galveston, Texas, Tiffany’s windows still carry their original weight—memorializing, comforting, elevating. Each site tells a story of art serving life, not just art for art’s sake.

A Documentary Dream

“Tiffany in the Wild” will weave these locations into a visual tapestry, each a vignette in a larger story—if we can secure the funding to make it happen. We’ll chase the light—how it dances through Tiffany’s glass, how architecture frames it, how people live with it. We’ll dig into the human stories: the patrons who commissioned these works, the artisans who shaped them, the communities that still cherish them. Partnering with places like Woodlawn Cemetery or Philadelphia’s preservation groups, we’ll uncover the stakes of keeping these works alive.

Time is against us. Every year, another Tiffany window is removed, another building razed. The 122-year-old window at Second Presbyterian in Chicago was recently restored and returned, but many others vanish forever. This film will document what’s left before it’s gone, showing why context matters as much as the art itself.

The Bigger Picture

This isn’t just about Tiffany. It’s about how we preserve art in the 21st century. Museums have given us access to masterpieces, and their work is vital. But Tiffany’s art was never just objects—it was light, space, and human connection. By filming these works in the wild, we’ll ask: How do we save not just the art, but the experience? How do we honor artists who wove beauty into the fabric of life?

As a filmmaker, I see Tiffany’s windows as scenes in a fading story. In the Bronx, they console. In Boston, they inspire. In Philadelphia, they surprised. My camera will follow these moments, capturing the last wild jewels of American decorative arts before they’re lost to time. “Tiffany in the Wild” is a dream we’re determined to share—if we can rally the support to make it happen.

Written in collaboration with Jeffrey Plank

Synopsis

Museums are guardians of beauty, carefully preserving Tiffany’s stained glass so future generations can marvel at its brilliance. Yet, behind glass cases and gallery walls, something essential is lost: the living pulse of the windows themselves. Tiffany did not design these works to be static relics. They were meant to breathe with light, to sanctify rituals, and to weave radiance into the rhythm of daily life.

What if we could see them as they were intended—not as artifacts, but as living art, still rooted in the architecture and stories that gave them meaning?

This vision lies at the heart of Tiffany in the Wild, a documentary journey we hope to bring to life with the support to make such an ambitious quest possible. It is a race against time to find and film Tiffany’s surviving works in their original homes—before neglect, development, or decay silence them forever.

The journey begins in Boston, at Arlington Street Church, where a luminous ensemble of Tiffany windows still glows above the pews for which they were made. From there, we move to Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, focusing on the 1896 Pratt Library—a Renaissance Revival treasure where the interiors, crafted by the Tiffany Glass & Decorating Company, still function as a living classroom of design, light, and craft.

In Manhattan, the story unfolds at St. Michael’s Church on the Upper West Side, where Tiffany Studios created one of its most dazzling ecclesiastical ensembles. Brilliant stained-glass windows and shimmering mosaics transform both light and stone into a sacred symphony.

The path then leads to the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, home to the largest assemblage of Tiffany funerary glass in the world. From mausolea like the Woolworth complex to the chapel itself, these works remain in dialogue with memory, landscape, and the passage of time.

Beyond the United States, the film traces Tiffany’s global reach. In Havana, Cuba, Tiffany Studios left its mark on major commissions—the Presidential Palace (now the Museo de la Revolución) and the grand residence of Josefina de Mesa y Mariana Seva for President Mario García Menocal, today the Embassy of China.

The story then moves to Mexico City, where the Palacio de Bellas Artes houses Tiffany’s legendary stage curtain—composed of nearly one million pieces of glass and weighing 22 tons. This monumental work transforms the valley of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl into a radiant landscape of light. Original studies for the curtain remain preserved at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, bridging past and present.

Finally, the journey returns north to Philadelphia, where the Curtis Building’s lobby holds Dream Garden—a monumental Favrile-glass mosaic designed by Maxfield Parrish and executed by Tiffany Studios. A luminous city-scale collaboration, it reimagines the very nature of public art and stands as the ultimate expression of Tiffany’s vision in dialogue with another great American artist.

In the end, Tiffany in the Wild is not only a story about stained glass, but about light itself—its power to sanctify, to console, and to inspire. By returning Tiffany’s works to their original contexts, we aim to let them speak again in the spaces and communities they were created for, reminding us that art is most alive when it is lived with.

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Tiffany in the Wild is a documentary journey into the stained glass and mosaics of Louis Comfort Tiffany, experienced as they were meant to be seen — in the churches, cemeteries, libraries, and civic landmarks where they continue to interact with light, space, and community.

From Boston’s Arlington Street Church to New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery, from Philadelphia’s Dream Garden to the stage curtain of Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, the film follows Tiffany’s art across borders and through time. It concludes in Chicago beneath the vast mosaic dome of Marshall Field’s, where commerce itself was transformed into civic theater.

More than a study of decorative glass, Tiffany in the Wild is a meditation on how art and light shape the way we worship, learn, remember, and live together.