“For years I have been keen on architecture and felt that the ugliness of our buildings actually menaced my happiness and felt breathlessly that I must help in the cause of good architecture.”
-Theodate Pope Riddle, 1900

Theodate Pope Riddle and Frank Lloyd Wright share the birth year of 1867, and both had Midwestern roots. Theodate was born in Salem, Ohio and spent her formative years in Cleveland. Wright was born in Wisconsin and began his professional career in Chicago, later opening his own studio in Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, in 1898, the same year Alfred Pope purchased property that became Hill-Stead.

Though the two never met, it is unquestionable that Theodate, working within the small radius of Connecticut and New York, knew of Wright, who has been described as the “greatest American Architect of all time” (American Institute of Architects). She wrote to her mother on May 26, 1919, of an impending project of his while traveling in Japan: “… We spent ten days there [in Tokyo] in the very well known but terrible, run down Imperial Hotel – the management is planning a new magnificent building designed by Frank Wright of Chicago to take its place.”

The B. Harley Bradley House (pictured bottom left) was built in 1901 for the Illinois businessman and his wife, Anna Hickox Bradley. The house is widely considered the first of Lloyd Wright’s iconic prairie-style homes that reflected the flat midwestern landscape. Their family lived in it until 1913 when they moved to Iowa.

Hill-Stead, Theodate’s breakthrough architectural project (pictured bottom right), was also built in 1901, for her parents Alfred A. Pope and Ada Brooks Pope. The couple lived here together until Alfred’s death in 1913.

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Drawing on the vast documentation of Hill-Stead’s archives, as well as primary source material culled from sources around the globe, including archives and correspondence of private collectors, galleries, and public institutions, the book features a groundbreaking biography and reconstituted art collection, illustrated in full-color, of this virtually unknown historic figure.

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The concept of “born in 1867” came from the nearly identical birthdates of Hill-Stead’s founder, Theodate Pope Riddle, and writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, February 2 and February 7 respectively. Born just five days apart, their life experiences could not have been more different—one was the privileged and doted-upon only child of a wealthy industrialist, who sought her own path against societal expectations, the other was the daughter and wife of frontier farmers, who had a life of almost constant economic struggle and yet embarked on a late-in-life career that gained her fame worldwide. Of the two, Laura is by far the more well-known. Both women, even as young girls, displayed determination and resilience in pursuing what they wanted to do. These qualities were prevalent among many women of this generation.

This exhibition provides a cross-disciplinary survey of 20+ American women who share the birth year of Hill-Stead’s architect, museum founder and benefactor, Theodate Pope Riddle. Through various objects, we represent women from various geographic sectors of the United States, multiple cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and a variety of professions and avocations, including the arts, medicine, literature, journalism, education, social welfare, and more. Lastly, Born in 1867: Theodate’s Generation, contextualizes the broader picture of the female demographic that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries not only overcame lingering Victorian views that frowned on women’s activities beyond school, church, and home but also found new roles and occupations for themselves in the fast-changing U.S. economy that emerged after the Civil War.

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Alfred Pope: An Evolution of Ingenuity illuminated a long-overlooked figure in the history of Hill-Stead and of American art collecting. Through this exhibition and accompanying catalog, we present Alfred Atmore Pope (1842–1913) as a bold and leading collector of European modernism and position him rightfully among his peers. Further, the endeavors position Pope as a multifaceted figure and elucidate his devoted and generous service to others, indelibly influencing his only child, Theodate Pope Riddle (1867–1946), in her pioneering life of creative and philanthropic work.

The research for this exhibition identified artworks previously unknown to Hill-Stead, such as Alfred Sisley’s La Serpentine à Londres, and revealed significant archival information about those already documented. In particular, we focused on the rapidly growing body of evidence about the ways in which Theodate’s previously unknown activities impacted our understanding of her father’s original, and by extension, Hill-Stead’s current collection. These exciting findings present a more comprehensive and nuanced picture to explore and interpret Pope as a collector.

During his active collecting years (1889–1907), Pope acquired over 40 important works of art and thoughtfully pruned his collection through sales and exchanges, retaining only those works that elicited a profound emotional response. Since Theodate, too, sold several paintings, in order to finance her own projects, only a small fraction of the original Pope collection remains intact today. Arguably, the finest examples of Pope’s turn-of-the-century connoisseurship still grace the rooms at Hill-Stead.

Alfred Pope: An Evolution of Ingenuity also examines and challenges long-held beliefs about his collecting strategies, practices, and motivations. Pope, who hailed from modest means and had no formal background in the arts, has long been revered as self-taught and ruggedly independent in the building and refining aspects of collecting. It was believed that he acted without relying on an advisor in any official capacity. American artists Mary Cassatt and James McNeill Whistler were both close friends and represented in Pope’s collection, and both tried to exert influence. To date, scholarship has shown that Cassatt indeed did.

Together, the show and catalog offer the first-ever comprehensive study and presentation on Alfred Pope, complete with a biography and a holistic assessment of his collecting pursuits and accomplishments. Through examination of his correspondence, together with consideration of the entirety of his collection, both the works in this exhibition that were divested for myriad reasons and those that were retained and now comprise the museum’s permanent collection, we elucidate an unprecedented understanding of this important historic figure.

This project was launched in autumn 2020 with preliminary research that yielded fascinating insights into Alfred, Theodate, and her decisions after his death to sell his art. Ultimately, Theodate single-handedly shaped Hill-Stead and distorted Alfred’s legacy. We are proud to share these story-altering discoveries and finally celebrate both with greater understanding and knowledge.

This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of our lead sponsor the Maximilian E. & Marion O. Hoffman Foundation Inc., the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation, and Centerbrook Architects & Planners.

The exhibition catalogue has been published with generous support from the Maximilian E. & Marion O. Hoffman Foundation, Inc., with additional support from the McPhee Foundation and the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation.

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Seeking freedom within oppressive societies, women throughout history have gravitated toward alternative creative and spiritual practices. One such practice is mediumship or communication with the spirit world through a human intermediary. There have been mediums among artists, and since most mediums are women, the history of mediumship in art dovetails neatly with stories of overlooked women artists. Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is one such figure. A Swedish artist and mystic, she was virtually unknown until 2018, when a revelatory exhibition of her work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York secured her a place in art history alongside male counterparts such as Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. Af Klint was inspired to create The Ten Largest—a group of ten massive abstract paintings created in 1907—through a series of séances she held with four other women who shared her beliefs. Known as The Five, they contacted spiritual beings they called The High Ones, who instructed af Klint in her groundbreaking work.

Hilma’s Ghost, named after af Klint, is a feminist artist collective consisting of Brooklyn-based artists and educators Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray. The duo makes art collaboratively, conducts free workshops and programs, and engages in research that uplifts ancient and premodern knowledge systems that have been a source of personal strength and aesthetic innovation for women artists. Tegeder and Ray, both independent artists, first collaborated in 2021 on a series of seventy-eight drawings, five paintings, and an original tarot deck titled ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT. That project—inspired by another overlooked woman artist, Pamela Colman Smith—motivated the duo to imagine new ways of expanding on the tarot’s hidden meanings and to deepen their investigation of the relationship between ritual, magic, and art through abstraction.

In RADICAL SPIRITS: Tarot, Automatism, and Feminist Histories, Tegeder and Ray will explore the creative, spiritual, and narrative potential of tarot, mediumship, and automatism in art-making. In this, they tap into the long-established but overlooked history of these practices at Hill-Stead. The museum’s founder and architect, Theodate Pope Riddle, was a contemporary of af Klint. She passionately supported exploration of the spirit world, participating in séances with notable mediums and funding psychical research. Automatic writing from those séances (and now housed in Hill-Stead’s library), is a core element of the exhibition, which entwines the history of Spiritualism in the Americas and Europe with automatic processes in art. As part of their research, Tegeder and Ray participated in channeling and drawing sessions at the historic house, facilitated by Sarah Potter, a professional witch, and engaged in other ritual and divinatory practices to create five new paintings for the show. These new works recover the lost art of theorem painting, a popular stenciling technique that was taught in girls’ academies throughout New England in the nineteenth century.

Hilma’s Ghost/Carrie Secrist Gallery

A selection from CHROMAGICK, a recent suite of drawings based on the tarot, will also be on view. Tegeder and Ray pulled cards from their tarot deck for compositional inspiration while also tapping their considerable knowledge of color and pigment to imbue the works with magic. Likening the drawings to “hidden gems,” they harnessed the innate vibrational energy of specific colors and crystals to imagine the works as talismans, each with their own special power. Through ritual processes that accompanied their art-making—including the burning of herbs, sigil making, and crystal, candle, and spirit invocations—the duo mined the potential of divination for their creative process.

RADICAL SPIRITS takes its title from a foundational 1989 book by Ann Braude that considers the importance of Spiritualism to the political liberation of American women in the nineteenth century. Hilma’s Ghost, initiated at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, reimagines the relationship between the spiritual and the political for a new era of liberation for women, nonbinary, and trans artists. In this way, the collective builds on the ancestral legacies of the powerful women artists who bravely drew on the occult in their work, including af Klint, Smith, Emma Kunz, and Leonora Carrington, but also those, like Ana Mendieta and Lygia Clark, who channeled the shamanic healing power of art for themselves.

ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT, the tarot deck by Hilma’s Ghost, will be available at the museum’s shop during the exhibition.

This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of DesignSourceCT.

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Hill-Stead embodies a passion for all manner of design—architecture, interior appointments, artistic vision painted on a canvas or etched into a plate and transferred to paper, horticultural…the list goes on. At design’s most basic level, Hill-Stead is a microcosm for life.

On the occasion of its 75th birthday, Hill-Stead takes this opportune moment in its history to reflect on the past as well as looking ahead to the future. We have partnered with Centerbrook Architects and Planners, the firm that designed our award-winning renovation and state-of-the-art new galleries, to present A Perfect Perch: The Architect’s Chair. The exhibition focuses on an item that is critical to our daily lives: the chair.

A chair meets dynamic forces with relatively slender parts. It also has to be comfortable and beautiful from all vantage points, like a sculpture. While many architects have designed a chair, it should be noted that after the experience the renowned architect Mies van der Rohe quipped, “A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.”

The chairs on view – those by Theodate Pope Riddle and the 20+ gorgeous examples by participants of The Centerbrook Chairshop – will serve as a connection between the past and the present, engendering appreciation, and curiosity. The Chairshop began in 2012 and reflects the firm’s devotion to craft, beauty, economy, and humanism. In designing her chairs, for her two landmark halls of education (Avon Old Farms and Westover schools), Theodate was equally concerned with how the buildings would be lived in by generations of students and faculty as by the physical attributes of the structures themselves. While she may not have put pencil to paper to sketch the actual design concepts for desks and chairs and tables and beds, she mentally designed the furnishings by selecting, or directing the manufacture of, pieces simple in design but of the utmost quality in materials and workmanship to fit within her overarching vision.

This exhibition is therefore timely and meaningful as we mark our 75th anniversary, honor our architect-founder as well as our collaboration with Centerbrook, and celebrate the power of inspired design.

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Video courtesy of Lev Verbitsky

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