After 71 years, artist honored for Berkeley church’s window design

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Judy North poses in front of a stained glass window she designed when she was 17 at Northbrae Community Church. The window was inspired by the spiritual “Love Comes a-Tumblin’ Down.” Credit: Nathan Dalton for Berkeleyside

One day, not long ago, a group of women showed up at Northbrae Community Church in Berkeley asking to see the chapel’s stained glass windows.

Ruth Brayton, a longtime parishioner, was tasked with showing the women around and was eager to share everything she knew about the windows. She’d always heard that they were designed by John Wallis of the famed Wallis-Wiley glass studio in Pasadena.

But one of the women in the group, Judy North, seemed to know more about the windows than Brayton did, and she soon made a startling declaration: It was she who had designed the two large windows that flank the chapel’s east and west sides more than 70 years ago.

At first Brayton didn’t believe her. The windows were designed in 1954. Surely anyone who had been old enough to design them was now gone to the great beyond. And why was this the first time she was hearing about it?

“She thought that Berkeley has a lot of weirdos in it and that I might be one of them,” said North, now 88.

“I thought she was hallucinating,” said Brayton.

North at 17, the age she was when she designed the stained glass windows at Northbrae Community Church. Courtesy of her family

But as North shared her story of taking a job with Wallis-Wiley at age 17, and relayed details about her work creating the windows — their inspiration, her early water color sketches, the construction of the finished pieces — Brayton began to believe her.

After North’s visit, Brayton became her biggest champion and began lobbying the church to honor the artist in some way and to finally give her the credit she was due.

That public lauding took place on Sunday, Nov. 9, with the installation of a plaque and an entire worship service devoted to North and her contribution to the church.

“This is our occasion to be able to celebrate who she is and what she has brought to this chapel,” said the Rev. Christy Ramage, the pastor of Northbrae Church. “And we will also celebrate the power of creativity, the possibility of imagination, and how that really informs our spiritual lives.”

Patterns made / Colors chosen

She left home at 17.

Desperate to find a job, she dropped by a stained glass studio in her hometown of Pasadena one day, thinking her artistic skills could be put to good use. She had studied art in high school and had put together a portfolio of her work and when she presented it to the studio’s owner, John Wallis, he hired her on the spot.

This photo of John Wallis appeared in the July 27, 1952, edition of the Pasadena Star-News. Credit: Newspapers.com

Wallis had helped design stained glass windows for houses of worship across the country, including the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the Riverside Church in New York City, the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Honolulu — one of the largest stained glass windows ever constructed at the time — and several churches in Southern California.

In the beginning, North (then Judy Collins) mostly did menial tasks like sweeping the floors (she once got yelled at for not knowing how to properly use a push broom), but Wallis saw potential in her.

“He told me that he was very good with Jesus in every posture,” said North. “Jesus with the sheep on his shoulders or Jesus with the little children, all those different features that he could do, but he knew nothing about modern art. So when he got those jobs, he was going to give those to me.”

One such job came from Northbrae Community Church, a non-denominational congregation founded in 1914. The church’s pastor, Laurence Cross, who also served as the mayor of Berkeley from 1947 to 1955, was known for his support of civil rights and a commitment to social justice, and he wanted the new chapel’s stained glass windows to reflect the church’s diversity of beliefs.

He gave the glass studio just two instructions for the east window: He wanted it to have a rainbow, to reflect the inclusiveness of the church, and he wanted to incorporate the African American spiritual, “Love Comes a-Tumblin’ Down.” For the west window, he chose the theme “Spread God’s love to the four corners of the Earth.”

North, age 28, in her glass blowing studio at Bennington College, where she worked as a teacher. Courtesy of her family

North at work heating glass in a furnace. Courtesy of her family

North took his brief instructions and got to work, first painting a small water color rendition, before moving on to the arduous process of creating two large stained glass windows.

At the Sunday service earlier this month, she outlined that process to the Northbrae congregation in a speech that took the form of a poem:

“Full sized drawings / Patterns made / Colors chosen … Patterns cut / Glass cut / Glass painted / Glass fired / Glass easeled / Glass leaded / Glass cleaned and numbered.”

The entire process took eight months before the windows were shipped to Northbrae to be installed. North was not there to inspect the installation, and in fact didn’t get to see the finished windows until several years later, when she was in her 30s.

Wallis designed the more traditional “Torchbearer Windows,” which line the chapel’s north side.

North worked at Wallis’s studio for three and a half years before relocating to San Francisco, where she attended the San Francisco Art Institute, and became friends with future giants of American art like Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley. She moved to New Orleans with her first husband and then returned to San Francisco, where she worked at the Actor’s Workshop doing set and costume design. She went on to teach theater design at Bennington College, where she also built a glass studio.

North stands next to a new plaque in the church that honors her stained glass work. Credit: Nathan Dalton for Berkeleyside

It was around this time that she met the painter Joseph Raffael, whom she married and had children. The couple soon moved back to California, settling in Marin County, where North still lives.

Through marriage and motherhood, North continued to make her own art, including designing stained glass windows for the Salvation Army Chapel in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and the Holy Name of Jesus Parish in the Outer Sunset. More recently she began painting large dog portraits, many of which were hung at San Francisco’s Slanted Door restaurant, and now grace the walls of its sister restaurant, Chuck’s Takeaway, in the Mission.

Choosing the name of North

During their marriage, Raffael became “very famous,” North said. And his fame was one of the reasons North ultimately decided to change her last name.

But the name she chose was born out of grief.

On Mother’s Day 1980, North’s 19-year-old son, Matthew, died in a car crash when his car hit a patch of black ice and went headlong into a milk truck. In her grief North took up scuba diving, and found that being deep underwater, where she had to remain absolutely present, brought her a sense of solace.

“ It was the only place I could get relief from my grief,” she said.

During the final phase of scuba certification, divers must perform what’s called “the checkout dive,” which involves using a compass and an anchor.

“You have to dive down to the anchor line and set your compass due north and then go out into the wilderness of underwater and it’s so easy to get disoriented down there,” she said. “But if you check your compass due north, you’ll get back to your anchor line and then back to your boat.”

After that experience, “North” seemed like an appropriate name. It was the way back to the boat, back to safety, back to home.

North and her family in the church. Credit: Nathan Dalton for Berkeleyside
Love Comes a-Tumblin’ Down

North’s name, of course, also evokes the site of her first major art piece: Northbrae Community Church, as well as the inspiration for the chapel’s west window: “Spread God’s love to the four corners of the earth.”

North is hoping to fix one aspect of that window, which the church refers to as the “World Window.” Due to where it was installed, the bottom corners are not properly lit. North is meeting with a lightning expert soon to find a way to illuminate them.

North also set Northbrae straight on the chapel’s east window, the design of which was inspired by the African American hymn, “Love Comes a-Tumblin’ Down.” For years, the church maintained that the window was inspired by the lyric “Love Comes a-Trickling Down,” a variant of the hymn, which was once recorded by the Kingston Trio.

North noted that the window’s brightly colored geometric shapes are clearly “tumbling” down from the heavens, not “trickling.”

The design of the windows was inspired by the African American hymn “Love Comes a-Tumblin’ Down.” Courtesy of Judy North’s family

At the service honoring North, the church made things right when the choir sang a rendition of the hymn, later joined in by the entire congregation. It was the first time that North had actually heard the tune, having only worked with the sheet music when she designed the windows.

Seek and ye shall find

Knock and the door shall be opened

Ask and it shall be given

And the love comes a-tumblin’ down

Sitting in the church, with light gleaming through the windows she designed 70 years ago, with friends and family members in the audience, with the choir and congregation singing in her honor, North was beaming.

“It was just heaven,” she said. “The whole place was just filled with love.”

After 71 years, artist honored for Berkeley church’s window design

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