The Weeping Girl

The Weeping Chorus, 2012, engraved and painted glass, by Judith Schaechter

 

In a small cellblock, # 14 of ESP, there is a small window featuring a small girl in a blue dress with yellow shoes.  She has tears streaming down one side of her face. The window is one of three (there is also a mother and a sister pictured in other windows) in the Weeping Chorus, a stained glass installation by Judith Schaechter on display at the museum for the 2012 season.  The window is made of two layers of glass with paint that has been fired on. The bluish tones from the sun shining through the glass illuminate the room, contributing the eerie, tragic and claustrophobic feeling I experienced in the decaying cell in which the glass is displayed.  The look on the girl’s face expressed not only pain, fear, and sadness on losing her father or brother to the prison system, but also on the difficult life she is now also destined to have.

This a striking image for visitors to ESP, who see the now stabilized high walled ruin as just another haunted house and would not be interested in art installations. Being locked up in Eastern State Penitentiary did not just affect the inmates within its walls, Schaechter’s Weeping Chorus reminds visitors of the fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters that suffered when a man or woman was imprisoned there. 

 

ESP will be starting official school tours this season and in my opinion, this window should be included on any tour along with the sculpture Elsie at Five Years Old, by Susan Hagen.  It is important for students visiting the museum to be able to make real life connections.  Teachers may be interested in using the stained glass and sculpture as prompts to engage students in a discussion about how they or how they might feel about living or knowing someone living in a corrections facility.  They may ask students to compare the difference between the girl depicted in the window, whose relative has been sentenced there to “Elsie” who actually lives there because she is the warden’s daughter.