A hundred years ago, the brand new Irish Free State asked a world-renowned stained glass artist to make a window that would tell the world who the Irish were. He made it. The government took one look and refused to send it. Today that window hangs on Washington Avenue in South Beach, and on Friday, Oct. 9, The Wolfsonian–FIU is throwing it a centenary party.

What the Geneva Window is

In 1926, five years after Ireland won its independence from the United Kingdom, the Free State government commissioned Harry Clarke to design a stained glass window for the International Labour Office in Geneva, Switzerland. It was meant as Ireland's gift to the League of Nations, a calling card for a young country that wanted to be seen as modern and cultured.

Clarke went big. With help from William Butler Yeats, the Nobel laureate, he picked fifteen of Ireland's greatest modern writers and gave each one a small, dense scene drawn from their work. Yeats and Lady Gregory, the two founders of Dublin's Abbey Theatre, are in it. So is a poem by Padraig Pearse, written the night before the British executed him for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising. The vignettes are packed with nationalism, religion, desire, sex and death, rendered in the jewel-like glass Clarke was famous for.

That was the problem. The finished window, completed in 1930, was condemned by Ireland's conservative government as too provocative, and officials made clear they felt it misrepresented the Irish people. Clarke refused to change it. In failing health, he went to Switzerland and died there three months later, at 41. His widow was paid for the window and then told it would never be installed in Geneva.

How it ended up in Miami Beach

The window spent decades as a famous orphan. It was shown at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin's municipal museum. In 1982, Clarke's sons lent it to Mitchell Wolfson Jr., known to everyone in Miami Beach as Micky, for an exhibition in Miami called Style of Empire, put on by the young institution that would become The Wolfsonian. After a brief trip back to Europe in 1988 for a show at the Fine Art Society in London, Wolfson acquired it for his museum.

It has been one of the treasures of the collection ever since, nearly six feet tall and a little over three feet wide, the kind of object that rewards standing very close for a very long time. Since November 2023 it has been the centerpiece of an installation at the museum about Clarke's life and the price of cultural censorship.

Friday night, in three acts

The evening starts with a reception at 6:30 p.m. At 7, Róisín Kennedy, a Clarke scholar from University College Dublin, gives a talk tracing how the window was made and why it caused such a fight, and what that fight says about art paid for by governments. The talk is free, with support from the Consulate General of Ireland in Miami.

After the talk, guests move through the galleries for a new dance piece by the Pioneer Winter Collective, titled this beauty that will pass, built as a response to the window's literary scenes and its themes of beauty, desire, censorship and impermanence. It is performed twice, at 8:30 and 8:50 p.m. Pioneer Winter created and directs it and dances in it alongside Lisa Kusanagi and Laurah Merisier, with costumes by Mr. Mostacho. The performance is ticketed at $20, or $10 for museum members, and registration is on The Wolfsonian's website.

Why it is worth a Friday

Miami Beach has plenty of nights out. It has very few that put a hundred-year-old political scandal, a world-class work of art and a new piece of local dance in the same room on the same evening. The window is one of the great objects in any Miami museum, and plenty of people who walk past the building on Washington Avenue have never been inside to see it.

There is also something particular about the story landing here. A window rejected for being too much for its country found a permanent home in a city that has never once been accused of being too little. If you have ever argued with someone about what a place should be allowed to say about itself, Clarke's window is worth an hour of your attention.

The Wolfsonian–FIU is at 1001 Washington Avenue, at the corner of 10th Street. If you cannot make Friday, the window stays on view in the museum's galleries.