© 2024 WSHU
NPR News & Classical Music
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Off The Path: Breaking The Tiffany Glass Ceiling

Tiffany glass lampshades
Corrado Serra
/
New York Historical Society

Tiffany lampshades — made of leaded glass — are icons of American art. Louis Comfort Tiffany showed them to the public for the first time in the 1890s. It was always assumed Tiffany designed all his lamps. But it took a century to recognize the contributions of the women who designed many of them — thanks to some long-lost letters.

Davis Dunavin loves telling stories, whether on the radio or around the campfire. He started in Missouri and ended up in Connecticut, which, he'd like to point out, is the same geographic trajectory taken by Mark Twain.