For the entrance to the Science and Education Building, Meière designed a metal-relief sculpture, "Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, and the Dragon of Ignorance," showing Hippocrates banishing superstition and introducing the scientific method. The aluminum and brass sculpture measured fourteen by twenty-one feet. Meière created several maquettes for the piece in her Art Deco style. A scale model of the Dragon’s head is part of the Rambusch Company Collection. Meière believed that “good exterior decorations are uncomplicated and easy to read, and that the heavy, the involved, and the gloomy have no place on the outside of a World’s Fair Building.”Above the entrance facing the Avenue of Patriots, Meière depicted "Primitive Man and Civilized Man" above an inscription from Sophocles, “Many wonders there are but naught so wondrous as man.” Rambusch executed the figures in terra cotta relief. Meière appreciated the fair giving mural painters “a great creative experience.”For the facade facing Washington Square, Meière designed portraits of Tadeusz Kosciuszko (left) and Comte de Rochambeau (right). She said: “My ‘Kosciuszko’ at the Fair almost did itself, and is essentially as it was from the first sketch, whereas its companion ‘Rochambeau’ had to be designed over and over again before it looked right.”[1] Unable to paint her murals due to union rules, she relied on Rambusch and artist H. Morton and was pleased with the result.Meière’s most colorful mural, "Man between the Past and the Future," appeared on the curved facade facing the courtyard. The Art Deco-style mural depicted a female figure reaching for the “ever advancing lamp of knowledge.” Man stands between a sphinx symbolizing the past and waves representing the future. Meière explained, “I drew a head ten feet high, I drew a doctor thirty feet tall... After the small sketches are approved... they are developed up through other scales... until the full-size cartoon is drawn. Then the artist is ready to go up on the wall... In my case, all my work from this stage on was executed for me by others... My designs for metal, mosaic, and terracotta also passed through the hands of good craftsmen, and came out, as usual, looking better than the cartoons.”[2]On the long facade facing the garden court, Meière designed a mural of "The Picnic," with figures painted by Rambusch. The mural measured fourteen feet high by one hundred ten feet long and depicted people engaged in various leisure activities.Meière decorated two facades at the south end of the building with related murals: "The Family" and "The School," featuring oversized figures of a family and a teacher with pupils in a traditional style. Ravenna Mosaics executed the murals in silhouette mosaic, with only ten percent in mosaic tiles set into colored cement. The New York Times described "The School" as “utilizing a mosaic technique, with small gilded tiles comprising the figures of a teacher and her children, against a background of smooth plaster in a soft, dull shade of green.” In January 1939, department store windows in New York displayed sketches by “living artists” of murals designed for the World’s Fair. Meière’s color was the green of "The Family" and "The School," presented at Bonwit Teller with cork floors “in simulation of the texture of the walls on which the artist has fashioned her mosaic murals on the Medicine and Public Health Building.”[3]
