Confluence
September 9th – November 1st, 2026Exhibitions
Opening reception, September 9 from 6-9 PM.
Confluence was born during a 2024 international artist’s residency at WheatonArts in NJ. It combines Anna Boothe and Nancy Cohen’s collaborative research into 300 years of regional glass history, that includes colonial era wares to contemporary scientific apparatus, and its relationship to local waterways, area ecology, and our changing climate. The nature of their collaboration is one of taking risks in ways that eclipse their individual studio practices. In doing so, they employ atypical combinations of methods and materials and serendipitously explore the experimental and conceptually fluid nature of their chosen medium, glass. By altering the material via familiar techniques in unconventional ways without predetermination, they push common boundaries of the medium and achieve results that are synergistic, unique, and expand mainstream visual norms.
In this joint project, Boothe and Cohen combine unlikely subject matter for art: history, science, and the environment. By exploiting the fluid/non-fluid duality of glass, they literally melt, and thus transpose, the static hard-edged quality of scientific glassware to reflect the soft-edged sinuous characteristics of the natural world. Into the mix, they integrate forms and colors from colonial glass, all the while evoking a deep understanding of each project element. Boothe and Cohen’s investigations produced hundreds of objects created from recycled and/or repurposed glass that they transformed into evocative sculpture and installations. For example, to create some of their glass parts they used 19th C. molds intended to make functional objects and instead generated forms they then altered to reflect the translucent contoured characteristics of present-day riverways; made faceted pressed-glass pieces in the facility’s vintage glass press, then melted the spoils over sand to develop new shapes; and filled scientific glass apparatus (seconds donated by the local industry) with metal oxides that when heated collapsed and trapped elusive x-ray-like drawings. The artists refer to them as “captured examinations of the past that illuminate visions of a future perspective.”
About the Curator
Dr. Ferris Olin is a Distinguished Professor Emerita at Rutgers University, where she was the co-founder and co-director (with Judith K. Brodsky) of Rutgers Institute for Women in the Arts, and The Feminist Art Project. With Brodsky, Olin (created the Women Artists Archive National Directory (WAAND), funded initially by the Getty Foundation, a digital directory of archives where the papers of women artists active in the US since 1945 are located.
Olin also established the Miriam Schapiro Archives on Women Artists at Rutgers as well as the Margery Somers Foster Center, a research center focused on documenting women’s leadership in the public arena collecting primary sources and creating scholarly resources using emerging technologies; served as Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women; and earlier, Director of the Art Library.
She was curator of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series from 1995-2006 and later (with Judith K. Brodsky) from 2006- 2014. The Series is the oldest exhibition space in the US showing work by emerging and established contemporary women artists and was founded in 1971 by the internationally recognized artist, Joan Snyder.
Olin has curated numerous other exhibitions, most recently, the fall 2023 Zimmerli Art Museum show The Brodsky Center at Rutgers University, Three Decades: 1986-2017. She and Brodsky curated a fall, 2024 Hunterdon Art Museum exhibition: Kimberly Camp-Cross River: A Parallel Universe. They previously presented the work of 25 visual artists from the Middle East and its Diaspora in Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society, and authored a monograph of the same title (DAP).
She and Brodsky co-authored a book of case studies on women’s leadership in the arts published by Rutgers University Press in 2018, Junctures in Women’s Leadership: The Arts; as well as a chapter on the College Art Association’s governance and diversity in The Eye, the College Art Association (2011).
Olin has served on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations and was Vice- President of the College Art Association and Treasurer of the Women’s Project of New Jersey. She is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and the College Art Association Committee Distinguished Feminist Award.
Exhibitions and programming at UrbanGlass are supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and with the generous support of the Robert Lehman Foundation, the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass, the Cowles Charitable Trust, and individual donors. Confluence was supported, in part, by Chemglass and Materials for the Arts and is presented in conjunction with Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a nationwide Semiquincentennial initiative to showcase the importance of the handmade both throughout our history and in contemporary life.
