“We went to Italy, and the glories of the Renaissance and all that preceded it opened before my hungry eyes, and I fell in love, once and for all, with mural painting and great beautiful walls.”

Hildreth Meière, one of the foremost Art Deco artists of the 20th century, devoted her professional life to creating dozens of “great beautiful walls”— interior murals and mosaics of breath-taking scope, color, and imagery — and exterior mixed-metal sculptures that imprinted the geometric curves and jazzy lines of Art Deco on some of the greatest American architecture of the 1920s and ’30s.

Walls Speak: The Narrative Art of Hildreth Meière, at the National Building Museum through Nov. 27, is the first major retrospective of Meière’s work. Not surprising, given that most of her pieces are massive and don’t lend themselves to museum spaces.

Exhibition curator Catherine Brawer has met this challenge brilliantly, by featuring preparatory sketches, painted cartoons and models, along with two finished mosaics and several altarpieces. (Almost half of Meière’s works are liturgical, including her mosaic “The Resurrected Christ” in Washington National Cathedral’s Resurrection Chapel.) Also featured in the exhibition are the tools belonging to Tony Schiavo, one of the mosaic craftsmen Meière worked with for many years.

Meière (1892-1961) set the standard in the collaborative arts of murals and mosaics. As Brawer notes in the exhibition, Meière recognized that her job was “to complement the architecture by translating abstract symbols and themes into narrative images that augmented the architect’s vision and emphasized a building’s cultural significance.” Meière put it more bluntly: “A good mural is one that can’t be taken away without hurting the design of the building.”

Meière learned the art of collaboration from her mentor, architect Bertram Goodhue, whom she met through Ernest Peixotto, director of the mural department at New York’s Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. Though women weren’t allowed to enroll at the Institute in the 1920s, Meière was able to enter its competitions, several of which she won.

Prior to this time, she had worked in theater, drawing sketches of the Pavlova Ballet and designing costumes for the Metropolitan Opera. She had several private commissions for murals, but it was under the guidance of Goodhue that she came into her own. “Goodhue was interested in innovation,” says Brawer. “and he recognized that quality in Meière’s work. Goodhue told her that her ignorance as far as creating large-scale murals was an asset, as she came to it with a fresh eye.”

Goodhue was pleased, also, with the drafting skills Meière brought to her art. These she had learned as a Yeoman 3rd Class in the U.S. Navy during World War I, where she trained as a map maker. (Meière’s patriotism was again expressed during World War II, when she was instrumental in the design and production of more than 500 portable altar triptychs for military chaplains.) Throughout the exhibition, the extraordinarily detailed sketches and cartoons are testament to her skills, as well as to her thoroughness and attention to detail.

Included are studies and sketches of Meiere’s first major commission for Goodhue, the “Temple of Science” dome of the Great Hall of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Here she learned how to design for the specific architectural aspects of a design, such as the pendentives that connect the dome to the arches below.

Also included in the more than 100 pieces featured are examples of the many mediums in which Meière worked, including mosaics, murals, ceramic tile, textiles, stained glass and metals. Her massive murals for the Chicago World’s Fair, 1933-34, and the New York World’s Fair, 1939-40, are represented, as are one of the most emblematic works of the Art Deco period, her medallions of “Dance, Drama, and Song” for the façade of the Radio City Music Hall.

Hilly Dunn, Meière’s granddaughter and the official photographer of the exhibition, was unaware of the “incredible scope and scale of my grandmother’s work until I began traveling the country to photograph for the exhibition. From the dome and floors of the Nebraska State Capital to a tiny chapel reredos in one of the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago—it has been a journey of discovery for me.” In seeing the works in their place, Dunn was able, also, to understand how her grandmother developed as an artist and how she then became instrumental in the development of the craft through her innovations.

Meière and her daughter Louise traveled through Europe every summer for many years. It may be this was where Meière found her inspiration for the dozens of liturgical works she created, among these reredoses for 12 Episcopal churches. The apse and narthex Meière created for St. Bartholomew’s in New York and the arch and ark mosaics for the main sanctuary of the city’s Temple Emanu-El are among the most beautiful of the works featured in the exhibition.

For all the exquisite beauty of Meière’s work, she wanted it to be understood that her art called for more than a good eye for color and a talent for technique. Time and again she emphasized that it was a business, one that called for absolute discipline, “long hours over a drawing board or a big easel, climbing up ladders onto scaffolding, being business-like and reliable, consistent and always finishing things on time. That’s probably not the artist’s life I thought of as a young girl studying in Italy.”

Whatever her dreams as a budding artist, Meière continues to be admired today for all her talents. “People are drawn to Meière’s designs because of her imagination and meticulous use of detail,” says Brawer. “The narrative quality of Meiere’s work makes it accessible more than half a century later to a contemporary audience.”

The National Building Museum is featuring a hands-on family workshop, Mosaic Mania, on June 19, 1-3 p.m. Families can learn how mosaics are created and take home their artwork. Registration required: www.nbm.org. For more information about Meière, check out the website of the International Hildreth MeièreAssociation, www.hildrethmeiere.com.