Event Images
Confluence
September 9th – October 30th, 2026Exhibitions
Opening reception, September 9 from 6-9 PM.
Anna Boothe and Nancy Cohen’s newest collaborative project, Confluence, integrates their research into southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey’s rich glass history, the region’s current scientific glass industry, and the local river system and environs that have played a central role, initially in the 1700s, by providing the necessary materials and distribution capabilities in the growth of this signature industry.
Inspired by glass artifacts revealed in the 2007 unearthing of Philadelphia’s first glass factory during a restructuring of the area’s Interstate 95 corridor, along with functional-decorative production wares produced for household use during the New Jersey’s late 19th C. glass industry heyday, the artists created hundreds of glass elements during their Spring, 2024 residency at WheatonArts’ glass facility in Millville, NJ. In fabricating their glass components, Boothe and Cohen used recycled glass, and employed vintage 19th C. molds and equipment, via a variety of glass-working processes.
The artists combined these glass parts with scientific glass apparatus (seconds donated by a local manufacturer) that they altered by various means to create unique free-standing and wall-mounted sculptures and installations.
Confluence runs the radius between Boothe and Cohen’s initial inspiration points and their newly found visual lexicon. The work holds vestiges of Colonial glass, its palette – greens, blues, ambers - and its utilitarian forms – pitchers, bowls, drinking vessels - while it also pays homage to the multi-textured, sandy and reedy, environment of the local waterways. The overall body of work brings-to-mind an awareness of systems – semi-functional, yet imaginary – and evoke a sinuous, river-like, yet regenerative sense of time and movement.
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.
